Supercomputing is Being Made Affordable
The overall cost of producing and acquiring computer equipment has been decreasing over many years and this is also true in the realm of Supercomputing. Supercomputers were once on a level far outside the reach of even many large corporations due to costing hundreds of millions of dollars; but, that has changed due to technological advances as well as cost reduction and Supercomputing power can be rented at levels as low as around $1000/hour. A company called Cycle Computing provides such services on several levels allowing companies to avoid the multi-million dollar cost of actually building their own Supercomputer. This way, the massive power of a Supercomputer can be utilized on an as-needed basis as opposed to maintaining a high cost mega-machine on a regular basis.
Supercomputers utilize tens of thousands of CPU cores to achieve their momentous processing goals. The number of cores used is adjustable and therefore so is the cost when renting Supercomputing resources. Companies that develop specialized software or study highly sophisticated scientific processes tend to benefit from these resources, and any person or entity that requires this level of computing may find that the cost continues to decrease as this trend has been in place for some time. You can read more about supercomputing here.