We just had another satisfied customer rent 3 computers for 1 day. Once again 5 computers are available for rental if anyone is interested!
Now I've realised what the problem is ...
You are assuming the only use people would put "remote GPU use contracts" to is mining Bitcoins ... there are numerous uses for GPU clusters - Bitcoin mining is just a tiny fraction of what people are doing with GPU clusters.
Take a look at the OpenCL and OpenGL projects.
If I only needed a GPU cluster for a couple of hours in total, I would definitely consider making use of something like this, at the right price.
Perhaps OptimalBitcoin would like to reply with how the machine specs available at $1.50/hour compare to the equivalent provided by Amazon in terms other than Bitcoin mining performance ...
"Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet"
You also have the benefit that you can pay for these in Bitcoin ... I could easily see a Bitcoin business formed around using these in a "on-demand" fashion for something like an online video encoding service for example.
OptimalBitcoin might also want to consider further time/money investment in promotion/advertising of these "remote GPU use contracts".
Whenever there is an offer for "remote GPU use contract" that is greater than ~$0.46/hr, it makes more sense to stop the mining and have them work on the "remote GPU use contract".
Yes indeed, but this relies on people being stupid enough to pay so much. You won't get many repeat customers once they realise they lose coins overall.
Actually you might be surprised.
Amazon does not offer Cluster GPU computing for Windows, I do. Amazon only offers Cluster GPU computing for Linux on the US East Coast. You also did not mention that Amazon charges for data transfer, which I don't. You cannot pay for Amazon in Bitcoin, as far as I know. I don't know about you, but I would rather pay 0.14 BTC/hour than $2.10/hour.
Comparison:
nVIDIA Tesla c2050: 1288 GFLOPs Single Precision/ 515 GFLOPs Double Precision 3 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 5870: 2720 GFLOPs Single Precision/ 544 GFLOPs Double Precision 1 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 5970: 4640 GFLOPs Single Precision/ 928 GFLOPs Double Precision 2 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6870: 2703 GLFOPs Single Precision/ 675 GFLOPs Double Precision 1 GB RAM
My machines dominate Amazon's nVIDIA Tesla machines in Single Precision calculations and my machines also win in Double Precision Calculations. Amazon's machines have greater CPU computations, but if you are renting for GPU use, as long as the CPU is not a bottleneck, it does not really matter as you need to compare GPU performance, not CPU performance. The only real difference where nVIDIA Tesla have an advantage are more memory, which tends to only be a concern for rendering applications and not if you are using them for GPGPU applications such as password cracking, etc, so it really depends on the application. Even so, the rendering capabilities of my machines are nothing to sneeze at and I can tell you they would perform quite comparably to the Tesla machines.
My current machines use the following hardware:
1: HD 5970 and one HD 5870
2: one HD 5870 and one HD 6870
3: three HD 5870s
4: three HD 5870s
5: two HD 5870s
Each machine has either 4 GB or 8 GB of 1333 mHz RAM, a 2.8 GHz, 3.1 GHz, or 3.2 GHz Phenom II x4 or Athlon II x4.
Investors and those concerned about any advantages that nVIDIA cards might offer for rendering applications should keep in mind that I have a deal to get 40% off nVIDIA cards for my new cluster, half of which will be built using nVIDIA graphics machines, and include nVIDIA Tesla cards and GTX 590s to cover this base.
If you have specific hardware requirements let me know what they are and I will make sure they are included in the new cluster that is built, which will be very competitive with Amazon's specifications and rates and most importantly, we will accept Bitcoins.
I cannot spend any more time discussing hardware specifics. If you are interested in using service or investing in my company, that is great, please let me know, but otherwise please do not waste my time asking questions that you can figure out yourself. If you would like to make a larger investment than simply bonds on GLBSE, please send me a PM.