Re:Seems kinda silly.... (Score 1)

I realize you're making a joke. However, there are people that want huge amounts of computing power occasionally, and it isn't cheap. Right now, the guys down the hall are distributing complex physics simulations to about one hundred computers across three or four distributed sites. We're planning on scaling it up soon. These physicists will take all of the computing power we can throw at the problem. They don't necessarily need the power to be in-house--running remotely is fine for them. Recently we helped an economics graduate student use about twenty four years of CPU time. Economics grad students aren't generally wealthy, and that kind of CPU time doesn't come cheaply. And then there are the biologists doing protein analysis, and the astronomers analyzing images of remote regions of the universe, and... IBM has a reasonable goal. If you want to get a lot of computing done and you don't want to invest in a full-time staff and a machine room and tens or hundreds of PC, it might be pretty reasonable to buy some computer time from them. This isn't as simple as timesharing. It's also not for your average user that wants to browse the web, write email, and chart the expenditures in their checking account. -alain