

Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses - brianbreslin

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.<p>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.<p>This idea came to me after reading about a sports betting database on espn magazine that was selling for 15k a pop.<p>So could you guys see applications for letting average users run queries cheaply against a giant cloud/grid computing tool?
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sz
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.

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brianbreslin
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.

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alastair
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.

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

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quantize
<http://infochimps.com>

