Thanks, that explains it. Cloud processing is one approach to speed up calculations of a distributable algorithm. Another approach is to use a GPU card (NVidia or ATI) that contains hundreds of processors. Programming is done under a somewhat "different" development paradigm but becoming popular nevertheless (e.g. http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html). GPUs are also now available on the cloud tho they're rather cheap to own.
Trader D