Supercomputers for Rent

About 15 years ago, supercomputers were thought of as rare and exotic creatures. Government laboratories in the U.S. and Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars on custom computing rigs and specialized facilities to house them in a bid to tackle the world’s toughest problems. When a new supercomputer came to life for the first time, the research center would hold a press conference, inviting onlookers to witness its calculating prowess.

And today? Well, you can sit down at the kitchen table, whip out a credit card, and rent the same amount of horsepower by the hour online. The master of the supercomputer rental is Jason Stowe, the 35-year-old chief executive officer of Cycle Computing based in Greenwich, Conn. Stowe’s company has written software that can talk to Amazon.com’s cloud-computing service and coordinate 50,000 or more of its computers to work on a single problem. Through a couple of years of trial and error, Cycle Computing has gotten the rental rate for these number-crunching beasts down to about $1,000 per hour. “This really is the democratization of large-scale computing,” Stowe says. “Now, even someone with a modest research grant can work on solving the most challenging questions.”