Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks

jfruh writes: Much of the history of computing products and services involves getting people desperate for better performance and faster results to pay a premium to get what they want. But Google has a new beta service that's going in the other direction — offering cheap cloud computing services for customers who don't mind waiting. Jobs like data analytics, genomics, and simulation and modeling can require lots of computational power, but they can run periodically, can be interrupted, and can even keep going if one or more nodes they're using goes offline.

Comments

Re:this sounds familiar

[msobkow]

The cloud has never been anything but old technology with new buzzwords.

I like it

[tsotha]

This is a really good idea from a resource utilization standpoint. Reminds me a lot of the power grid - you have to have enough hardware to handle the peak load, but idle capacity just costs you money.