Sun Microsystems extended its Network.com grid computing pay per use utility to European customers today, providing on-demand computing infrastructure for $1 per CPU-hour.

The Network.com service, which runs on Solaris 10, is designed for developers, open-source communities and independent software vendors (ISVs) compiling or testing new applications, as well as enterprise customers running specific compute-intensive tasks.

Network.com provides instantly available, low-cost, high-performance processing resources that can be rented by the hour, and has been available to customers in the US for over a year, primarily because most of the Sun datacentres hosting the servers were based there.

Sun claimed last month that 100s of customers from a wide range of industries, including life sciences, education and manufacturing, have signed up to use Network.com, with over 20 applications on offer.

Network.com marketing group manager, Rohit Valia, did not comment on what type of applications were being used, but said customers are typically small to medium businesses (SMBs) that do not have local access to the same level of compute power, or firms that offload jobs when their own CPU capacity is full during peak times.

"Some purchases are in multiple blocks of 10,000 CPU-hrs, but most buy in 100s of CPU-hrs. For example, if a job used 1000 CPUs for one minute, it would be aggregated as 1000 CPU minutes, or 16.67 CPU hours, which rounds up to 17 hours and a $17 bill," he said.

Network.com does not provide any service level agreements guaranteeing access, performance or reliability, however.

"WAN bandwidth requirements [at the customer end] vary greatly with the type of application and data needs for processing. Heavy computational bound applications can deal with low bandwidth while data intense applications would need a much higher bandwidth," said Valia.