There are many options for people who need to rent HPC resources, but Cloudnumbers.com aims to provide an easy to use service tailored specifically for their needs. It's not clear whether it has its own infrastructure or if it's reselling from another provider.

Although platform-as-a-service providers are springing up all over the place, especially since Salesforce.com acquired Heroku, we haven't seen any specializing in R yet. Considering the increased popularity of R for data mining and analytics, it's only a matter of time before Cloudnumbers.com faces some competition.

Edward Borasky, who tipped us off about Cloudnumbers.com, maintains a couple SuSE appliances that include R and other data mining tools. Perhaps it's time for a hosted service?

Last week we covered RStudio, a cross-platform and open source IDE for R which happens to be available in the cloud.