Current projects and applications

Grids offer a way to solve Grand Challenge problems like protein folding, financial modeling, earthquake simulation, and climate/weather modeling. Grids offer a way of using the information technology resources optimally inside an organization. They also provide a means for offering information technology as a utility for commercial and non-commercial clients, with those clients paying only for what they use, as with electricity or water.

Grid computing is presently being applied successfully by the National Science Foundation's National Technology Grid, NASA's Information Power Grid, Pratt & Whitney, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Co., and American Express.[citation needed]

One of the most famous cycle-scavenging networks is SETI@home, which was using more than 3 million computers to achieve 23.37 sustained teraflops (979 lifetime teraflops) as of September 2001 [3].

As of March 2008, Folding@home had achieved peaks of 1502 teraflops on over 270,000 machines.

Another well-known project is distributed.net, which was started in 1997 and has run a number of successful projects in its history.

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility (NAS) has run genetic algorithms using the Condor cycle scavenger running on about 350 Sun and SGI workstations.

Until April 27, 2007, United Devices operated the United Devices Cancer Research Project based on its Grid MP product, which cycle scavenges on volunteer PCs connected to the Internet. As of June 2005, the Grid MP ran on about 3,100,000 machines [4].

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, which is based in the European Union and includes sites in Asia and the United States, is a follow up project to the European DataGrid (EDG) and is arguably the largest computing grid on the planet. This, along with the LHC Computing Grid [4] (LCG) have been developed to support the experiments using the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The LCG project is driven by CERN's need to handle huge amounts of data, where storage rates of several gigabytes per second (10 petabytes per year) are required. A list of active sites participating within LCG can be found online[5] as can real time monitoring of the EGEE infrastructure.[6] The relevant software and documentation is also publicly accessible