Sun will offer utility computing services priced at a dollar per processor per hour, it announced Tuesday.

The company will aim the services at applications tolerant of high latency between processors, such as simulations, modeling and rendering, all easily optimized for grid computing, it said.

The utility computing services, part of Sun's N1 Grid program, will cost $1 per processor per hour in the U.S. Sun did not say when the services will be available.

In the future, Sun expects businesses to buy computing capacity in much the same way they buy mobile phone services today, paying for a service plan allowing a number of hours of calls -- or calculations -- per month. It plans to push the analogy further, selling compute-minutes wholesale to service provider partners, who would then resell the processor time to their customers.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.