Black stone's compute farms

Blackstone estimates that the current market for compute farms, which roughly equals the replacement market for engineering workstations and departmental servers, is in excess of $1 billion in North America alone. Providing insight into this market, Ranauro explains, "the average computing budget for a two year old start-up electronics company is about $1 million annually. For established firms and departments of large companies, this budget hovers in the $5-10 million range. The New England market alone, which may comprise 10% of the North American electronics market for compute farms, is around $100 million."

Scheduling software, called "load sharing," is the enabling technology of a compute farm. Load sharing software keeps track of when demands rise and fall, and then prioritizes and schedules jobs accordingly. When demand subsides - during nights and weekends - low priority jobs that are queued will automatically be run, making more power available for the bursts in demand that occur often every day, and the peaks that strike at the ends of product cycles.