Supercomputing at less than the cost of a gallon of gas

Computerworld - A supercomputing, pay-per-use service that would make supercomputing affordable to small and midsize businesses, as well individuals who need added computation power, was announced today.

Interactive Supercomputing Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based company said its Star-P On-Demand lets users tap into 168 processor cores on Intel quad chips.

This is not a software-as-a-service offering that gives users access to the application and the compute ability. Instead, users would take an application they already have installed on their laptop or workstation, such as MatLab, computational software developed by The MathWorks Inc., and offload intensive computational work to the supercomputing platform.

The cost is $2.77 per processor core per hour, or about $465 an hour for utilizing all the cores. Users connect using Secure Shell, or SSH, according to Dave Gibson, who heads business development at Interactive Supercomputing. The computer is run by Interactive Supercomputing's partner Tsunamic Technologies Inc. in Orlando.

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