The economy of parallel and distributed computing in the cloud

Large-scale simulation and analysis software is used heavily in the VLSI industry. One would naturally think that it´s a job for HPC. However, the cost of such clusters and the existing pricing model of commercially available software packages lead to some interesting tradeoffs and business models. We propose the use of cloud computing and a corresponding pricing model that directly relates to the amount of computing accomplished. This should promote better utilization of both hardware and energy in using such software.