IBM Provides Access to Blue Gene On Demand

neutron_p writes "IBM's world renowned Blue Gene supercomputing system, the most powerful supercomputer, is now available at new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, MN. The new Center will allow customers and partners, for the first time ever, to remotely access the Blue Gene system through a highly secure and dedicated Virtual Private Network and pay only for the amount of capacity reserved. Deep Computing Capacity on Demand will service new commercial markets, such as drug discovery and product design, simulation and animation, financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets. The system enables customers to obtain a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops."

Comments

Google?

[macpulse]

I wonder if Google will compete with this when they release their supercomputer grid/cluster to the world.

First SUN, and now IBM...

[JawzX]

Who's next to offer "pay as you compute" access to supercomputer level systems? Apple? HP? Toshiba? Hitatchi? Is this going to be a new market segment or just a flash in the pan? Are companies going to begin outsourcing computer time? Are there going to be giant compute centers in India housing huge systems crunching numbers for companies that would have planed to invest in a lower level super computer for inside use? Will this kill supercomputer/supercluster sales or drive them up?

An interesting development for sure.

I wonder, which APIs they support

[mi]

Parallel Virtual Machine? Any of the Message Passing Interface implementations?

Or does one need to re-write her/his software to use their own?