Distributed Computing Economics, "In a ClusterComputing.org article, Jim Gray, director of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Lab, provides an interesting economic analysis for building distributed systems. When do you choose a grid over a cluster or a supercomputer? When does it pay off to move a task to the data vs moving the data to the task? He takes current hardware and networking costs into account to answer those questions."

i had an idea a few years ago after reading "Peer-to-Peer", why not have a company sell computers at a discounted rate with a future allowance for the use of spare cycles. The company fronts part of the cost of the computer and the consumer pays them back the loan in resources. You could also say "donate" resources as many do today to organizations like seti@home, or even sell them to corporations who could use them. There could be an interface between the distributed client and server which tracked the available jobs. The user then could select which jobs it wanted to work on and the server would get the work units and credit the users account for futre payment.

Just an idea!!!