Cray Research is now offering its Urika-GX supercomputer as a cloud computing service, targeted at life-sciences customers looking for compute cycles to solve some heavy problems.
This offering, done with cloud infrastructure provider Markley, makes Cray one of the last high-performance computing providers to give cloud computing a try. But few companies actually need it.
Most enterprise-based R&D shops just need high-performance computing services from time to time, and they rarely need a specific platform such as the Urika-GX. And they can get the more generic high-performance computing services from Amazon Web Services or other modern cloud providers.
Supercomputers have always been out of reach for most businesses. That’s why they were made available through time-sharing in the pre-PC era, and why more recently companies would purchase a supercomputer jointly they would then share.
