Yep, we quite aware of all of these issues. My background is in HPC and my previous company was a successful exit to a major oilfield services firm. My software and its descendants are used on nearly 100,000 CPUs.
We are definitely focused on the applications that have extremely high compute/io ratios. In general, these boil down to either high compute problems with no real data or problems where the data can be shared between multiple work units. An example of the latter is stock market analysis - the nodes download stock data for a few stocks and stay busy running different combinations for a very long time.
So that brings up a good issue, namely the proprietary nature of the code you're distributing. For instance, stock market analysis firms zealously guard their algorithms. Let's say I'm a potential customer: How will you protect my bytecode from being stolen by competitors when it has to be run on unmanaged machines in the wild?
Good question. There really isn't anything that stops someone from reading and trying to interpret the byte code.
There is some protection in the fact that you never know what type of work unit is happening at a given time. The algorithms are typically each snippets of code instead of full applications, so someone would need to piece together quite a lot of information.
Of course, if someone is particularly concerned, they can run a jar obfuscator.
We are definitely focused on the applications that have extremely high compute/io ratios. In general, these boil down to either high compute problems with no real data or problems where the data can be shared between multiple work units. An example of the latter is stock market analysis - the nodes download stock data for a few stocks and stay busy running different combinations for a very long time.