windowpain's Journal: Submission: Rent the Computer Cluster That Made Middle Earth

The 1,008-processor cluster of computers used to render The Lord of the Rings movies is now up for rent on a per-processor per-hour basis. According to an article on the BBC site it runs Red Hat 9 and uses 2.8Ghz Xeon processors to perform '2.8 trillion calculations a second' making it the 104th fastest system on earth. In addition to rendering for Van Helsing, I Robot and Peter Jackson's forthcoming remake of King Kong, the system has also, according to an article at The Inquirer, been used by a Canadian biotech firm and a 'mysterious chip developer from the US that remains unidentified.' The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the system is also being used 'to test the scalability of a computer program that tracks the evolutionary origins and histories of everything from HIV to whales and languages.' Predictions, anyone? How long before you're carrying around that much computer power clipped to your belt?