if they could pull it off it would put a huge crimp in any supercomputer type system
Well, I wouldn't go that far. There are many different types of problems to be solved. Some of 'em need a thousand-node super-uber-bandwidth supercomputer if you're going to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, while others can be done just as well on a million noninteracting nodes. Certainly there are some folks with problems of the second type out there, and I'm sure they'll make great use of google's resources here. But there are other folks who really need to invert a 100,000 by 100,000 matrix, and there ain't no magic way to embarrassingly-parallelize that.
Well, I wouldn't go that far. There are many different types of problems to be solved. Some of 'em need a thousand-node super-uber-bandwidth supercomputer if you're going to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, while others can be done just as well on a million noninteracting nodes. Certainly there are some folks with problems of the second type out there, and I'm sure they'll make great use of google's resources here. But there are other folks who really need to invert a 100,000 by 100,000 matrix, and there ain't no magic way to embarrassingly-parallelize that.