Try it, then rent it or buy it. That's the new mantra from supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics this morning as it launches its own supercomputing on demand offering, dubbed Cyclone.

If cloud computing means virtualized server instances, then technically speaking - as if SGI could speak any other way - the Cyclone service is not a cloud. But if cloud means buying server and storage capacity on demand to run preloaded applications or homegrown ones and only paying for what you use - what some of us still call utility computing - then Cyclone is a cloud.

SGI has set up three types of infrastructure as part of the Cyclone service. The first is a cluster of Altix ICE blade servers (which come from the original SGI side of the house) based on the current Nehalem-EP Xeon 5500 quad-core processors; this cluster is based on InfiniBand interconnects. The second cluster is based on the Altix 4700 Itanium-based supers, which implement global shared memory using NUMAlink 4 interconnects for the blade-style server nodes.

Pricing for the Cyclone cloud is fairly straight forward. It costs 95 cents per core hour for a Xeon core (such as the X5560 running at 2.8 GHz) or an Itanium core (such as the Itanium 9100 running at 1.66 GHz). The Xeon cores come with 2 GB to 3 GB of main memory each, while the Itanium machines come with 2 GB to 4 GB of memory per core.

Read the entire article from the Register here.