Digital Ribbon Inc. has its sights on becoming the world's leading exchange for high performance computational resources. The firm recently added a high speed 97-node Beowulf cluster at the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation and training (IST) to its stable of potential resources. This addition brings Digital Ribbon's total capacity to more than 1,030,000 CPU hours per month at the market rate of around 60 cents per hour.

Erik Weaver, chief executive officer at Digital Ribbon, said that the increased capacity positions the company as a leading exchange for the buying and selling of computational power worldwide.

"There are hundreds of companies worldwide that use enormous amounts of computational power for research and development work," Weaver explained. "We are moving into a knowledge-based economy which requires tremendous amounts of computational resources."

"Companies with deep pockets traditionally invest in mainframes, supercomputers and Beowulf clusters, but for small firms, startup firms and companies who need substantial power for short periods, we deliver those resources in a secure pure on-demand format from one to 1,000 nodes on an hourly to monthly basis," Weaver said. "We are offering a cost effective alternative to help balance these highs and lows in bioinformatics, advanced simulation and oil and gas discovery markets."

The exchange creates a secure way to make the IT department a revenue source and deliver larger ROI gains, while lowering capital requirements for short to medium length data intensive problems.

Digital Ribbon is in the process of expanding resources into the distributed environment in an effort to develop complete sources for computing resources. "We are contracting to supply 25,000 computers by the end of this year in a controlled-distributed environment," said Weaver.