These are all very good questions and we certainly know that we're not the first company to do grid computing on PCs. :)
First, $1500/node-year (or even $200/node-year) comes to a very substantial amount of money for our target customers. These customers use 10000s of nodes and buy high-end computers and pay a ton for network, power, cooling, and support personnel.
My background is in HPC and I've faced and solved these issues many times. We have a multi-pronged approach to using the compute power:
1) We are definitely writing our own apps on top of Plura. It's a great source of compute power and we have lots of ways we want to use it ourselves.
2) We have a short list of very high impact embarrassingly parallel customers that are evaluating Plura. We intend to help our customers absorb the porting cost associated with Plura.
3) We are open to letting students and universities use Plura's excess capacity for free. We've had several nibbles at this already.
That being said, we realize Plura is not for everyone. It is for a subset of the class of embarrassingly parallel applications out there.
First, $1500/node-year (or even $200/node-year) comes to a very substantial amount of money for our target customers. These customers use 10000s of nodes and buy high-end computers and pay a ton for network, power, cooling, and support personnel.
My background is in HPC and I've faced and solved these issues many times. We have a multi-pronged approach to using the compute power: 1) We are definitely writing our own apps on top of Plura. It's a great source of compute power and we have lots of ways we want to use it ourselves. 2) We have a short list of very high impact embarrassingly parallel customers that are evaluating Plura. We intend to help our customers absorb the porting cost associated with Plura. 3) We are open to letting students and universities use Plura's excess capacity for free. We've had several nibbles at this already.
That being said, we realize Plura is not for everyone. It is for a subset of the class of embarrassingly parallel applications out there.