HP offers instant heavy-duty computing to companies

Companies crunching large databases and running complicated engineering simulations often need extra computer power. HP thinks that buying computers just for one project just doesn’t make sense and is publicly offering spare CPU-cycles from their servers - For a price. The service builds on their enterprise utility service that was started in November 1999.

Customers sign up and are scheduled for computer time on a giant server farm. The HP servers, powered by Intel Xeon, Intel Itanium and AMD Opteron processors, will dish out the computing power to customers. Large computer farms are nothing new and movie studios have used them to render out computationally expensive special effects. In fact, the service builds on HP’s work with the movies Shrek 2 and Madagascar. Engineering firms also use computer farms to perform structural, crash and fluid analysis.

HP is offering a "try-before-you-buy" program where potential customers are given consulting and a 48-hour pilot program.