Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses

Posted by brianbreslin on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:17AM
from the ask-hn dept.

This is more of a brainstorming question than anything. Extremely curious what you all think about this concept. This was inspired by jasonlbaptiste's post on turning excel tools into saad offerings.

So my question is do you think there could be a consumer demand for spot queries against large scale datasets. I.e. A realtor wants to know the number of houses for sale in the us to war veterans between the ages of x and y during the lat 15 years.

This idea came to me after reading about a sports betting database on espn magazine that was selling for 15k a pop.

So could you guys see applications for letting average users run queries cheaply against a giant cloud/grid computing tool?

( 5 comments | 5 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses by sz on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @04:00AM (#1978483)

Not unless you have a specific use case to address. In my experience the average user is pretty unimaginative about applications of general computing tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses by brianbreslin on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @10:37AM (#1979329)

i figured you'd need a few large data sets to start with. find verticals with data needs (stock market/finance for one) that have lots of quantifiable data.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses by alastair on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @05:27AM (#1978618)

Infochimps and others have proved there is a market for large niche datasets, but I think the idea of hosting said data and charging per query could work - but is really just a twist on what the incumbents are already doing.

P.S what happened to YC-backed datamarketplace.com? Their site seems abandoned.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses by bobf on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @07:42PM (#1981332)

Interestingly, Google announced something similar recently -- 'BigQuery' -> https://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses by quantize on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @01:13AM (#1978194)

http://infochimps.com

[ Parent | on HN ]