Grid Computing: Buying Computing Power, by the Hour

When biotech company Applied Biosystems "bought" 36,000 hours of computing time on 1,000 machines, it figured it could quickly translate data from a genetic project. But how much more quicker than doing it inhouse?

"It basically saved us a couple of months worth of computing time," De La Vega says. "The alternative would have been for us to expand our internal compute farm, and pay the electricity and cooling costs on that, even knowing that it would be idle probably 50% of the time."

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