Supercomputing For Rent

Forbes.com (Jun 4 2009) Cloud Computing

1. Exa is streamlining the number-crunching business--and its customers' rides. The hind end of a bobsled poses a thorny physics problem. When air slips over a four-man sled as it careens along an ice track at 80 miles per hour, it hits a wind pocket behind the tail and becomes a storm front of tiny vortices that drag on the fiberglass-composite shell. So when the U.S. national bobsled team decided last year to revamp its sled's aerodynamics to compete in the world championship, no mere desktop computer could model that turbulent slipstream. A PC with a single Intel ( INTC - news - people ) processor chip would have taken six weeks to simulate a mere three seconds of a one-minute run. Instead, the team turned to an IBM supercomputer capable of crunching the same three-second simulation over the course of a single afternoon. But rather than pay $1 million to own that ... (Read Full Article)

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