Hi folks,
Sun Microsystems (yep my employer!) announced its 'sun grid' system a while ago. Basically rather than building your own supercomputer and paying for the administration etc. you submit jobs to Sun and pay for just the processing power you use (1$ per cpu hour).
Up to now this was only available to the USA. Last week they opened it up to some other countries[1]. And to promote it they have a limited time promotion whereby when you sign up you get 200 cpu hours free computing time.
I don't think there are general astronomical simulators there already, but there are resources there to help develop applications. Some of the astronomy/IT students/grads here might be interested in mucking about with it.
If you're interested in supercomputing in general and in particular developing parallel applications you might find it worthwhile to register at
www.network.com
and play around with this.
Cheers,
~Albert
[1]Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
  