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According to John Patrick, IBM's vice president for Internet strategies, "the next big thing will be grid computing

It is a form of distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks.

It can be small -- confined to a network of computer workstations within a corporation, for example -- or it can be a large, public collaboration across many companies or networks.

"Distributed" or "grid" computing in general is a special type of parallel computing[citation needed] that relies on complete computers

connected to a network

by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet.

The primary advantage of distributed computing is that each node can be purchased as commodity hardware, which when combined can produce similar computing resources to a multiprocessor supercomputer, but at lower cost.

One feature of distributed grids is that they can be formed from computing resources belonging to multiple individuals or organizations (known as multiple administrative domains). This can facilitate commercial transactions, as in utility computing, or make it easier to assemble volunteer computing networks.

Grids offer a way to solve Grand Challenge problems such as protein folding, financial modeling, earthquake simulation, and climate/weather modeling.

The European Union has been a major proponent of Grid computing.

According to John Patrick, formerly IBM's vice president for Internet strategies, "the next big thing will be grid computing." [1]

back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and Web services.

European DataGrid (EDG) and is arguably the largest computing Grid on the planet

along with the LHC Computing Grid [5] (LCG), has 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.