Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) has rolled out what it is calling a "budget supercomputer" in a London event. The computer maker wants its newer and cheaper supercomputer offering to be used in research dealing with custom cures for cancer as well as searching for universe origins in all the radio wave data that spills into the earth these days using large collection dishes.

Is this a move into a new area of computing or a publicity stunt? Neither, but it is Dell's attempt at some good press, something that has been lacking for the company in recent years. With commodity computer parts available to just about anyone who wants them, Dell will once again be assembling commodity machines (supercomputers) to sell to large clients that need a lot of processing power to sift through all the data available to them. Dell's entrance (if it can be called that) is not really all that unexpected, as both competitors Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) have been in the supercomputer field for a very long time. Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) made the practice of stringing together many standard PCs to make a supercomputer popular years ago as well.

Dell's new 'Legion' system will have the processing power of 3,000 desktop PCs and will target those who need cheap computing power available from commodity components without spending a fortune on proprietary systems and parts in the process. As Dell basically defined the role of commodity computer supplier in the last decade and a half, it should be primed to fill this role while giving in to the need of "adding value" to what could be seen as a boring commodity market. If Dell can bring more and more cheap supercomputing to the field and compete against International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) (which leads all others when it comes to built supercomputers), then it may just have something.

Yesterday, a company claiming to be the first of its kind in the financial industry was launched. Gstock is "a technical analysis-based website for private and institutional investors." It harnesses volunteer computing power, similar to the way SETI does, to become, according to its claim, "the world's first-ever virtual supercomputer dedicated to stock picking."

I talked to Oren Rossen, co-founder of Gstock along with Nir Ben Levy, and found a fascinating entrepreneurial spirit, much in the manner of early Google days.

Melly: Oren, what is your background?

Oren: After working as an analyst and being the treasurer of the MIT Israeli chapter, I became a consultant to companies that could see through the technology but had no business perspective.

Melly: Tell me how the idea for Gstock came about and how you developed it?

Oren: About two years ago, I received a call from someone in the business department of the Technion, the #1 technical university in Israel, with an interesting question: "We have a donor who is extremely wealthy and who believes that the next big thing is supercomputing based on grid or distributed computing. He is willing to pore large sums of cash on a project that would both have a technological edge and be commercially viable. However, we don't have a clue what can be done commercially with so much computing power."

I was familiar with non-profit ventures on the Internet that use distributed computing networks such as SETI@home or protein and DNA mapping, but there was no valid business based on distributed computing.

I discussed it long with Nir and one day it just popped out. It was very ambitious, but the idea was to gather huge computing power and give the private investor an edge on any fund manager to basically win the market. If until now private investors had to compete against giants and professionals (who have better resources), then we can now equip this regular private investor with a supercomputer, and not only that, he would also enjoy the flexibility that professionals don't have building his portfolio in a very dynamic manner.