Hemeris started with a 64 node 128-processor Power PC cluster. From a performance and power consumption point of view this is a very good system, but as there is more demand for Intel architectures, Hemeris has decided to offer their on-demand capacity on that system.

Introducing another term, Alain Marsily says Hemeris is offering its csutomers "externalisation services". It is not outsourcing, as they only use it for part of their computing needs. It is not ASP, as it is remote computing only. Customers do not have their data at Hemeris, but only do computing their, through secured, Internet based links.

Hemeris has customers in several countries, including Belgium, the Free University Brussels (ULB), the Universty of Liege (ULg) and the University Paris South.

Hemeris will also participate in the European project In-Silico Prediction of Gene Function (GeneFun). In this project, coordinated by Professor Shoshana Wodak (ULB), Hemeris will will provide computing power on its cluster hardware, and help fine-tune the various computationally intensive algorithms.

The availability of large computer power for the GeneFun project will make the generation and analysis of a comprehensive set of protein family trees feasible on a time frame. This allows for the first time benchmarking different methods, including methods for combining sequence and structure alignment, which are very time consuming, but can be easily parallelised.

Hemeris offers the system with several Linux versions as operating system: SuSE, Red Hat and Debian. One can start with this computing on demand for 1 euro per CPU hour.