So, I think about the only way you are going to make that $100k is if you are going into business for yourself. In that light, you need to solve a problem. Here are a bunch of problems that I would pay money for(hopefully others too):
1. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the ability to expand to 3072. I'm will to pay $1k for this plus the price of shipping.(Don't care if the parts are old)
2. I need to dress better. A service to pick out the clothes that I wear and should buy. Willing to pay $120 per year for this.
3. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this.
4. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this.
5. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k.
6. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.
They set you up with a stylist, all the service aspects are free, then they send you a trunk of clothes to try. Pay for whatever you keep, send the rest back with free shipping.
Let's say, conservatively, that doing the research to know how to build this, having never built a pc before, takes 20 hours. I bill at 100-160 an hour, so let's take the low end and cut it in half, and say my opportunity cost is $50/hour.
The cost of building one of these is (20 * 50) + 700 = 1700. If someone can build one for me at $1000 I'm money ahead.
It's easy to forget that knowledge acquisition isnt free when you already poses the knowledge.
If you're not following hardware, that google result isn't going to help much (other than maybe giving you an idea of basic cost of such a system). There's lots of ready-made vendors, generally they're all crap (for a certain value of crap).
There's a big difference between building a one-off rig, and buying one, working with it for a year or so -- getting your code right -- and the knowing you can get 20 more (updated and/or cheaper) -- that won't have driver issues, heating issues or flaky psus. Sure, a contract can help, but whatever you get "back" in cases of failures are always going to be much less than whatever value you wanted in the first place (eg: the hardware ended up being free, but you weren't able to sequence the genome because of glitches).
In short, don't underestimate the cost to acquire the required domain knowledge to do such a task well.
One can always hope that the new Mac Pro will be successful enough that there'll be a decent Cuda story there -- but I'm not holding my breath. And after seeing what Apple did vs Final Cut pro and OS X server (esp: hardware) -- I'd be wary of trusting them with any production platform.
I've read from http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc that low-cost computers are cheaper from ready-made vendors. Not sure if you can buy a cheap ready-made PC with 300 cuda cores, though.
>>I don't understand the motivation will be for someone to use a such service instead of building it by himself ...
Personally, I have no interest in learning how to build computers. I'm not into hardware[1] and have no problem paying a premium for someone else to just put stuff together, make sure it works then send it to me.
BTW, wasn't this Alienware's business model?
1. There is one exception though; the videogame console hacking scene.
Arguably this is all hardware vendors business model (Dell, HP, Sun (now Oracle) ...). But yes, I guess Alienware, pre-dell had that business model, and you might say Penguin Computing does something similar. I'm sure there are others.
2. +1. I went shopping today and didn't find anything that I truly liked.
3. +1. The deeper I dive into the technology world, the farther I feel from my friends who won't work in this sector and it's becoming harder than ever to find something to talk about that isn't programming-related. Being an empty conversationalist is a surefire way to lose friends fast.
4. Goes with number 3, so I'd pay for this too.
The other ideas sound cool but I haven't ventured into hardware hacking yet ;)
1. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the ability to expand to 3072. I'm will to pay $1k for this plus the price of shipping.(Don't care if the parts are old)
2. I need to dress better. A service to pick out the clothes that I wear and should buy. Willing to pay $120 per year for this.
3. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this.
4. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this.
5. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k.
6. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.