This article is from last week, and I meant to comment on it, but never did.

IT World Canada has identified what it thinks are the top 5 IT trends for 2007. Number 4:

Host hardware: Supercomputing for the masses.
…Large technology players such as IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. already sell computing power to sizable corporations, typically on a large scale. But new services from the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and 3tera Inc. are bringing on-demand computing to midsize and small businesses. This concept is known as hosted hardware…

As has been pointed out, it’s cheaper to use a dedicated hosting provider for ongoing needs that don’t fluctuate. But for occasional bursts of use, the on-demand model pays off for businesses that don’t have a lot of computing power in house.

The key to turning this into a trend rather than a fad is all the attention being given right now to virtualization. More details here (scroll down a bit).

I think we could be on this path, but 2007 is not going to be a breakout year. HPC is still too hard to: {program, execute, understand}.