Sun recently announced the availability of the Sun Grid Compute Utility for public use. This is a service that I seem to recall HP and IBM talking about for some time. Looks like Sun is giving it a try. From the Sun Grid website: "Sun Grid provides an easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource for the predictable and all-inclusive price of $1/CPU-hr."
This is basically a homogenous compute farm running Solaris 10 with the Sun Grid Engine for job control. As it is open for diverse public use, it accepts only self-contained programs specifically compiled for the Solaris 10 (32 or 64-bit) platform. This is an interesting development at a time when many companies and academic institutions alike are considering the benefits of outsourcing to data centers. Passing over maintenance and administration of a likewise massive computational center has several advantages; there’s some benefit in Sun (or any centralized compute center, like the Los Alamos Blue Mountain computer cluster ) being able to scale up easily, and heat removal and power consumption spring quickly to mind. However, it's not clear that bioinformatics compute cluster needs mesh well with such a vanilla implementation such as Sun's. Bioinformatics programs, at least on the level I run, tend to be development style programs, which benefit from a customizable compute environment (if you want to install and freeze some versions of software). From an academic standpoint, many grants don’t allow for this type of computing model yet. The pay as you go model does not play well with grant expirations - transferring funds from your grant to a PayPal account may raise a few eyebrows.
