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Consider for example a rendering farm.

Such as ResPower. They've been around for a while, from before the "grid" era (remember the "grid" era?). This is a good example of a service which successfully scales up the number of machines applied to your job based on available resources and load. Unlike a web service, though, ResPower normally runs fully loaded, and charges a daily rate with variable turnaround, rather charging for each render. (They do offer a metered service, but it's not that popular.)

It's worth looking at ResPower because, unlike most of the "grid" or "cloud" services, they have an established customer base and make money.

We've heard this before. There's a presentation in AFIPS 1966 in which someone from Control Data was saying that each metropolitan area would have one giant, shared supercomputer.

"Grid computing" was a flop commercially, once the vendors started charging for it. Sun's service is still around, but they don't talk about it much any more. That was more like an effort to find something to do with their unsold server inventory. ResPower Render Farm has a real but very specialized business, quietly rendering 3D frames for the film industry.

Amazon has been making some noise lately, but they don't promise much: "Without limitation to Section 11.5, we shall have no liability whatsoever for any damage, liabilities, losses (including any loss of data or profits) or any other consequences that you may incur as a result of any Service Suspension." Clearly they're not serious about offering a service to businesses.

There are successful services, like Salesforce, but those offer more than raw compute power.

I wait anywhere from six hours for a few days for my raytracer to calculate a print-resolution still image on my (admittedly long in the tooth) dual-CPU Athlon for my clients, and rent time on a 750-node cluster when they want animation. 20% is a huge deal.

For many decades, IBM only rented machines; they didn't sell them. Not until they lost an antitrust case did they sell hardware. Rented machines came with IBM service, which was excellent. Now that was "hardware as a service".

What Amazon is offering is called "time-sharing".

Remember Sun's "grid computing"? Big dud. The number of people who want to pay to run huge batch jobs but don't want to buy their own hardware just isn't that big.

There are two players in this space who are known to make money: Akamai and ResPower Render Farm.

ResPower is successfully serving that market, for money, and their prices are good, probably better than Sun's. Supports 3DS, Lightwave, Maya, Blender, etc. 484 frames are rendering right now. "Over 12 million frames rendered".

ResPower is one of the very few "grid" companies actually selling a service for which people will pay.

7054 frames in the rendering queue.
7036 frames in the rendering queue.
7001 frames in the rendering queue....

This is in an industry where the software works well on clusters and customers are used to outsourcing. Yet it's a business disaster: ResPower's load today: 1 frame in progress, 0 waiting, 500 machines available. 99.8% of their machines are idle today. Worse, if you see only one frame in progress, it's probably their freebie demo. Anybody can create an account and render one frame on one machine for free.

ResPower used to be busier. Maybe it's a slow week. Or month. Or year.

Despite the "grid enthusiasts", grid computing, as a business, is a disaster. You can build it, but they won't come.

That sounds about right. Scientific time sharing hasn't been a good business model since 1980. If you need heavy compute power, you get your own cluster. If there was a viable business model in this space, hosting companies would be selling this as a service. They already have the right infrastructure.

For a while, it looked like commercial render farms might be a viable business. But today's stats at ResPower read "Running frames: 3, Waiting frames 0", so only 3 of their 500+ computers are active right now.

The "use spare cycles on other people's PCs" model works fine, if you're a spammer or an adware/spyware company. But nobody seems to be paying out money to home users for spare cycles.

There are commercial render farm services running right now. Over 400 machines. 440 frames are rendering right now. Over 6 million frames sold. On line. Self service. VISA/MC accepted. The going rate is about $1/GHz/hour, before discounts.

And they never mention "grid computing".

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