Will pay-per-use computing work? Sun thinks it will, so we will see.

“Back somewhere before the dawn of time, when I first got involved with
computers, computing resources were incredibly expensive. On the big iron
machines that I first encountered, the cost of use was so high that users
were allotted and billed for CPU seconds. And the cost-per-second could be
quite significant. Of course, this was also in the day of punch cards and
batch jobs, where a couple of days of work spent punching cards was followed
by dropping the cards off at the computing center for the program they
contained to be executed at some point in the future by the computer
operators. For the cutting edge in computer technology, I had available a
teletype terminal with a paper tape reader and a 110-baud modem so that I
could do work remotely. But whatever I chose to do was limited by the
available CPU time allotted to my account. But now it appears we have come
full circle with Sun’s announcement on Sept. 21 of N1 Grid Computing
Pay-Per-Use Cycles. In this concept users will be able to buy computing
cycles on other people’s computers on an as-needed basis. The PPU concept is
based on making use of the N1 Grid Container technology that was announced
last march. [Continued…]”