Prof. Eric Brewer of Inktomi talked about the re-emergence of the time-sharing idea in the form of web service in his recent interview with FT. Tell me if I am being dumb, but is he saying what I am hearing or is the journalist confused with what he was actually saying?

The combination of GridGain with Amazon EC2 is a poor man's super computer.

Max Gorbunov tells his experience in his blog of running Monte Carlo simulations on 512 nodes

My Comprehensive Model Backtester also relies on GridGain, but on a local quad-core machine. It is an efficient and easy (so far I find) way of taking advantages of multi-core machine power.

"Amazon's a pretty serious dark horse" in that race, says Internet visionary Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech publisher O'Reilly Media Inc. "Jeff really understands that if he doesn't become a platform player, he's at the mercy of those who do."

Amazon's CEO wants to run your business with the technology behind his Web site. But Wall street wants him to mind the store.....

......those initiatives may provide a boost for Amazon's retail side. For one, they potentially make a profit center out of idle computing capacity needed for that retail operation. Like most computer networks, Amazon's uses as little as 10% of its capacity at any one time just to leave room for occasional spikes. It's the same story in the company's distribution centers. Keeping them humming at higher capacity means they operate more efficiently, besides giving customers a much broader selection of products. And the more stuff Amazon ships, both its own inventory or others', the better deals it can cut with shippers.

At the AMD Global Vision Conference today, Marty Seyer, senior vice president of the commercial business unit, touted the Torrenza Initiative, which he said would enable the development and deployment of application-specific co-processors and other chips that work alongside AMD64 processors in multi-socket systems. First revealed in June, Torrenza basically opens up AMD's crown jewels"“Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology"“to OEMs, providing a standard socket that can be applied to many kinds of tasks.

Seyer was joined on stage by representatives from Fujitsu Siemens, Cray, IBM and Sun, who provided endorsements for Torrenza as an open initiative that will spur innovation.

Amazon.com announced on Thursday a service to provide computing power on demand over the Internet.

This hosted service, called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), is in limited beta testing and is aimed at software developers writing Web applications.

The service is offered to developers, who can tap into the server-processing service to quickly meet their application's changing needs. Rates start at 10 cents per "instance-hour" consumed--a dime for the use of a guaranteed minimum amount of computer capacity running particular server software......

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6109202.html?tag=nl.e589