"The concept of the cloud is the future of parallel and ssi computing. You have the ability of instantiate a cluster in minutess to do your heavy calculations, you pay for bandwidth & processing time. Then when you don't need it you pack up your image & go home... much more cost and time effective than maintaining your own cluster."
My ex used to work at NRC/CNRS the office close by to where Blue Bonnets was. So I can only go by what she told me about they operated. They have a room filed with a 'cluster'. Alessandra was doing molecular modelling, rather CPU intensive stuff for a plethora of reasons. When she had a 'job' to process, she had to submit it to done sometime after working hours, otherwise it would simply take over all the machine's capacity. The cluster is set up so that it portions out its work space according to needs, it is always on, save for particular things or events. So everyone has access to the cluster as needed. It is the work space that is split according to the requirements of the moment and the jobs at hand. All the computers on the site are networking, are on line and whatever else you care to mention. And yes, it's a Linux system. Set up in that, or a similar fashion, I don't see where out sourcing would be more cost effective. A large corporation that needs cluster work, would already have all the machines and networking matériel on site! A small company, if it needed that calculating power, would probably have a more sizeable computer as THAT would be far better cost wise.
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