So grid computing will play into our vision of computing as a utility.” While companies like IBM would build the large-scale grids, Turek says that many users will want to set up grids of their own.

Charles Schwab's new Linux-based grid computing system, developed with help from IBM, includes only 12 servers now. But starting next year, the discount brokerage plans to tap into thousands of ...

What now drives grid computing, however, is the cost-push of a commodity technology, rather than the demand-pull of problems worth solving at almost any price.

Grid computing to date has largely been the terrain of academics and start-ups. But established tech companies are now nudging the concept toward the mainstream business world.

Grid computing closely follows Web services in Gartner's 2002 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle, which provides a look at the progression of technologies (see Figure 1).

The Global Grid Forum (GGF) A community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or grid technologies.

Yet the commercialisation of the technology comes at a price. Grid computing has become the latest term in the IT lexicon to be hijacked by sales and marketing.