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According to this story, Internet grandfather DARPA (U.S.-based Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) is throwing open its doors and wallet in an attempt to solicit unconventional security solutions.

They’re reaching out past the usual huge, multinational technology consulting firms and egghead think tanks, and trying to engage with small start-ups – and even hackers – in order to get some new ideas into the mix. Looks like they’re willing to throw some cash at them, too. So far, so good – and a reasonable strategy to pursue.

But what brought me up short was a brief mention of their asking ‘hobbyists’ for input… what the hell are they thinking? Do they have any idea what they’re getting themselves into?

This story by The Register’s Chris Mellor perfectly illustrates the problem with using clouds for anything important. Briefly, a photographer was using Flickr to store his pictures online – eventually amassing more than 4,000 photos over five years. Being the helpful sort, he alerted Flickr to another user who was stealing content. Flickr mistakenly deleted HIS account, and all of those pictures now look to be gone forever. So what recourse does this unfortunate user have?

X-ISS is continuing to push into turnkey HPC with the recent introduction of their VizHPC visualization offering. It’s a combo deal of hardware and services that will cover the wall(s) of your choice with monitors showing highly detailed representations of data coming off your clusters in real time. They have flavors to suit a variety of tastes, including Linux, Windows HPC Server 2008, and standard Windows.

X-ISS is an interesting company in other ways as well. Based out of Houston, they’ve been around for almost 20 years, offering a full slate of HPC systems and services.

Most HPC vendors focus primarily on the business of providing highly optimized, cutting-edge systems and HPC solutions; they’ll configure the right boxes and get them running well enough to hit the required performance metrics. X-ISS does that stuff, but they also do quite a bit more.