I've written previously how being around long enough in any field teaches you that there's nothing new under the sun in that field, one time dealing with privacy and another time dealing with RIAs, specifically AJAX. Consider this post the start of an arc which is another installment in the Nothing New Under the Sun series, this time dealing with buying computer time in order to answer complex questions. According to the article, Amazon started this service as a test in August '06. Costs are US$0.10/hour of computing time and US$0.15/gigabyte-month of storage. I can understand the appeal to Amazon and any other company with huge computer farms at their disposal; their own internal requirements won't make efficient use of their system's capabilities. Allowing other users access to the computer farms distributes the costs of maintenance, etc., across a wider audience, hence is a benefit to those making their systems available and to those making use of their systems. I also appreciate that no computer system, from PC to massively parallel systems, is ever utilized at 100% or anything close to it. A desktop PC could solve the same problem Amazon's computer farms could, the only difference is that the PC might take years to do it while the computer farm might take minutes or days. The savings to those making use of Amazon's largess is in time, not actual results. (more to follow...)
» Nothing New Under the Sun (Buying Computer Time, part 2)... from BizMediaScience
Nothing New Under the Sun and Buying Computer Time, part 2 [Read More]
Tracked on: December 16, 2006 10:44 AM | Permalink to Trackback