A nice thing about computing as a utility, as opposed to electricity, is that you can pick your provider no matter where you live. Most of us don’t get to pick our electric company.
I’ve been meaning to point to this article that the HPC Watercooler found for a couple days, but haven’t gotten to it until now. The article compares computing rates and services from Google, Amazon, and Network.com in a handy table.
Not familiar with these services? Here are how each company describes what they offer:
“Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire…” –Amazon.com.
“Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.” –Google.com.
“Sun Microsystems Inc’s Network.com offers flexible access to pay-per-use computing resources of the Sun grid computing utility and its growing catalog of high-performance computing applications. For example, a user is charged $17 US for using an application across 100 CPUs for 10 minutes each or 100 minutes on 10 CPUs (i.e., a total of 1000 minutes or 16.67 CPU-hours).” –Network.com.
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