Commercial uses for grid computing?

Question

I keep hearing from associates about grid computing which, from what I can gather, is highly distributed stuff along the lines of SETI@Home.

Is anyone working on these sort of systems for business use? My interest is in figuring out if there's a commercial reason for starting software development in this field.

Answer 1

Grid computing is really only needed if you have a lot of WORK that needs to be done, like folding proteins, otherwise a simple server farm will likely be plenty.

Answer 2

Financial computation:

http://www.jayeckles.com/research/grid.pc

Answer 3

• Rendering Farms such as Pixar
• Model Evaluation e.g. weather, financials, military
• Architectural Engineering e.g. earthquakes.

To list a few.

Answer 4

Obviously Google are major users of Grid Computing; all their search service relies on it, and many others.

Engines such as BigTable are based on using lots of nodes for storage and computation. These are commercially very useful because they're a good alternative to a small number of big servers, providing better redundancy and cost effective scaling.

The downside is that the software is fiendishly difficult to write, but Google seem to manage that one ok :)

So anything which requires big storage and/or lots of computation.

Answer 5

I used to work for these guys. Grid computing is used all over. Anyone who makes computer chips uses them to test designs before getting physical silicon cut. Financial websites use grids to calculate if you qualify for that loan. These days they are starting to replace big iron in a lot of places, as they tend to be cheaper to maintain over the long term.