a friend was asking me what i think about grid computing: on-demand access to global computer resources.

tech review had an article on it. i just can read the first paragraphes but they have a right question at the beginning:

Is Internet history about to repeat itself?

nothing to add. they still have to solve a lot of problems though, if they really want to make data federation and integration possible on a broad costumer basis. (necessity of open standards, end of proprietary software to let data flow over clusters of servers, to build up "silos of applications" ...), the tech review picked out one of the giant projects:

The National Science Foundation will begin to install the hardware for the TeraGrid, a transcontinental supercomputer that should do for computing power what the Internet did for documents. First, clusters of high-end microcomputers will be set up at four sites: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago; Caltech in Pasadena, CA; and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego.

as far as i know they use this computer power to simulate the surfaces of stars by "gentrifying a big pile of fortran code", as brian says.