Linux Magazine: Imagine that in addition to all of the information of the World Wide Web, your Internet connection gave you the sum of all the computing power that was simultaneously connected. After all, at any given moment, some large percentage of the world's computers is simply sitting idle. Because of grid computing, this isn't such a far-fetched idea, even though the realities of security and privacy certainly make it impractical or at least a distant wish.

You might ask, "Why would anyone want to do this?" It's unlikely that the average desktop user cares about harvesting extra cycles from a remote computer to help read email, but for resource-hungry enterprise applications, the ability to get more done with less has tremendous potential and appeal. Does a day go by when some datacenter manager isn't asked to cut the budget while providing better performance?

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