Actually Joyent's manta is quite similar in concept to what we've been doing for years (before manta came out). The idea is to build very capable systems and aggregate them. Not a bunch of fairly low end units (like typical AWS/etc). Our argument is that if you are going to build a high performance computing infrastructure, you ought to build it in an architecturally useful manner. The cost to do so is marginally more than "cheap n deep", while the savings (fewer systems needed for very large analytics) is substantial.

My company is Scalable Informatics (http://scalableinformatics.com)