How It Works
Parabon Capacity Market
We transform otherwise wasted capacity into valuable computation.
It's no surprise, computers are used at only a fraction of their capacity. For example, the average daytime utilization of server class machines varies between 5-20%1. And, some experts believe utilization rates fail to exceed 5% when desktops are included.2
With over a billion computers connected to the Internet, why would we want to power our Computation on Demand® utility with dedicated hardware in costly data centers when we can instead purchase excess capacity directly at the source? Parabon contracts with institutional providers, such as universities and businesses, to securely execute grid tasks with their excess capacity. Our providers get a newfound discretionary revenue stream and our users get the computational capacity they need.
The approach scales to produce levels of computational power that are otherwise unachievable and yet, because it employs excess capacity, it provides the most affordable high-performance computation available anywhere.
As with any utility, most users enjoy the benefits of Frontier without giving a thought to the source of its underlying capacity. They just run their Frontier-enabled applications and get results faster and more affordably than they can anywhere else. But, if you'd like to learn more about the supply side of our business, feel free to visit the Parabon Computation Market.
1 Taurus - A Taxonomy of the Actual Utilization of Real UNIX and Windows Servers, David G Heap, Principal IT Consultant, IBM Enterprise Server Group, January 2003.
2 Grid Computing in Financial Markets: Moving Beyond Compute-Intensive Applications, Larry Tabb, Tabb Group, November 2003. http://www.tabbgroup.com/PublicationDetail.aspx?PublicationID=68
