High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

From their website:
Condor is a specialized workload management system for compute-intensive jobs. Like other full-featured batch systems, Condor provides a job queueing mechanism, scheduling policy, priority scheme, resource monitoring, and resource management. Users submit their serial or parallel jobs to Condor, Condor places them into a queue, chooses when and where to run the jobs based upon a policy, carefully monitors their progress, and ultimately informs the user upon completion.

While providing functionality similar to that of a more traditional batch queueing system, Condor's novel architecture allows it to succeed in areas where traditional scheduling systems fail. Condor can be used to manage a cluster of dedicated compute nodes (such as a "Beowulf" cluster). In addition, unique mechanisms enable Condor to effectively harness wasted CPU power from otherwise idle desktop workstations. For instance, Condor can be configured to only use desktop machines where the keyboard and mouse are idle. Should Condor detect that a machine is no longer available (such as a key press detected), in many circumstances Condor is able to transparently produce a checkpoint and migrate a job to a different machine which would otherwise be idle. Condor does not require a shared file system across machines - if no shared file system is available, Condor can transfer the job's data files on behalf of the user, or Condor may be able to transparently redirect all the job's I/O requests back to the submit machine. As a result, Condor can be used to seamlessly combine all of an organization's computational power into one resource.

Update 2: Summize Computes Computing Resources for a Startup. Lots of nice graphs showing Amazon is hard to beat for small machines and become less cost efficient for well used larger machines. Long term storage costs may eat your saving away. And out of cloud bandwidth costs are high.
Update: via ProductionScale, a nice Digital Web article on how to setup S3 to store media files and how Blue Origin was able to handle 3.5 million requests and 758 GBs in bandwidth in a single day for very little $$$. Also a Right Scale article on Network performance within Amazon EC2 and to Amazon S3. 75MB/s between EC2 instances, 10.2MB/s between EC2 and S3 for download, 6.9MB/s upload.

Now that Amazon's S3 (storage service) is out of beta and EC2 (elastic compute cloud) has added new instance types (the class of machine you can rent) with more CPU and more RAM, I thought it would be interesting to take a look out how their pricing stacks up.

The quick conclusion:the more you scale the more you save. A six node configuration in Amazon is about half the cost of a similar setup using a service provider. But cost may not be everything...

One of the premier scaling strategies is always: get someone else to do the work for you. But unlike Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, you won't have to trick anyone into whitewashing a fence for you. Times have changed. Companies like Ning, Facebook, and Salesforce are more than happy to help. Their price: lock-in.

Previously you had few options when building a "real" website. You needed to do everything yourself. Infrastructure and application were all yours. Then companies stepped in by commoditizing parts of the infrastructure, but the application was still yours. The next step is full on Borg take no prisoners assimilation where the infrastructure and application are built as one collective. What you have to decide as someone faced with building a scalable website is if these new options are worth the price.

Update 2: 3tera has added Dynamic Appliances, which are "packaged data center operations like backup, migration or SLAs that users can add to their applications to provide functionality."
Update: in an effort to help cross the chasm of how start building a website using their grid OS, 3tera is offering their Assured Success Plan. The idea is to provide training, consulting, and support so you can get started with some confidence you'll end up succeeding.

If you are starting or extending a website you have a problem: what technologies should you use?

Now there are more answers to that question than ever. One new and refreshingly innovative answer is 3tera's grid OS. In this podcast interview with Bert Armijo from 3tera, we'll learn how 3tera wants to change how you build websites.

How? By transforming the physical into the virtual and then allowing the virtual to be manipulated as if it were real. Could I possibly be more abstract? Not really. But when I think of what they are doing that's the mental model I see whirling around in my mind. Don't worry, I promise we'll drill down to how it can help you in the real world. Let's see how.

The Sun Grid Compute Utility is a simple to use, simple to access data center-on-demand. Sun Grid delivers enterprise computing power and resources over the Internet, enabling developers, researchers, scientists and businesses to optimize performance, speed time to results, and accelerate innovation without investment in IT infrastructure. No matter the size of your business or the size of your job -- there is no barrier to entry and exit. This is the future of computing available today: IT as a service.

TGL delivers Virtual Private Datacenters and virtual private servers from grids of commodity servers. Each TGL grid consists of a pool of HP servers connected with a Gigabit backbone network and running 3Tera's AppLogic grid operating system.

With a Virtual Private Datacenter, you get complete control of your own private grid. Using our visual interface, you set up and assemble disposable virtual infrastructure, including firewalls, load balancers, web servers, database servers, NAS boxes, etc. visually, by pointing and clicking. You can build advanced clusters, deploy large and small applications, and save them as templates that can be provisioned in minutes. You can even build your own virtual servers and appliances.

Can you really create an infinitely scalable infrastructure for less than $100 using Amazon's storage, grid, and queuing services platform? It appears so, at least for the right application. Amazon beams a spot light on the future battle of the roll-your-own versus the connect-the-dots approach to building next generation websites using core external services. Their argument is strong. Using Amazon's platform you can quickly build an infrastructure that would otherwise take an eternity to make, a pile of money to create, and an unbounded mass of people to implement and maintain. Yet Amazon doesn't provide SLAs, so you can you really trust them with your crown jewels? Facebook recently leap frogged Amazon's vision with an even more comprehensive set of services. The battle for the future is on.