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Vendors orchestrate thousands of PCs to tackle truly tough problems.
Closer to home, startup vendors now compete to sell aggregated computer services and the necessary infrastructure to businesses. A few even have paying customers in compute-intensive industries such as bioinformatics and financial analysis. Distributed computing faces stiff competition from traditional compute farms, which typically employ similar aggregation and coordination techniques but run them on servers and workstations bought for that purpose. Distributed computing's key cost benefit is its ability to exploit the unused processing power, storage and network bandwidth of existing hardware. The company also has pilots with six bioinformatics companies that Reynolds won't name.