Amazon's Elastic Computer

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/08/24.html#a1513

From Jon Udell's blog.

This is a very short screencast about Amazon's new EC2 web service.

When you first watch it, it is hard to grasp the potential importance of this. EC2 is a new high-performance computing service for rent...to anyone. Quite cheap plus you only pay for the time and server capacity that you need or ask for. For certain applications, this could make some major changes. Imagine being able to harness something like a Cray 2 supercomputer for the afternoon...or half an hour. This service is just launched and still in beta. So it is not immediately obvious how the average user will be able to take advantage of this. Grid computing is not just like running a super fast Pentium. It is only useful for certain things...but for those things, it will make a huge difference.