Youve all experienced it. While prowling the cube farms you see a system with the SETI@home screensaver running (thats the application that launches itself as a screen saver, grabs some radio telescope data over the Internet, then analyzes that data for nonrandom patterns. Once we find the intergalactic equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies, we will know there is [other] intelligent life in the universe. Or not). Some well-intentioned nut is using corporate CPU cycles to find E.T. And this isnt even misusing corporate resources. The analysis only runs in the background when the box isnt in useright? Wrong. Let that space-camp washout search for intelligent life in the universe on his own dime. But that doesnt mean the concept is altogether bad. There are a lot of wasted CPU cycles and storage space on all those computers in your enterprise. Maybe there is a good way to utilize some of that excess capacity by enabling grid computing.

Dont Go Away!
Hold on a second. Yes, there are insurance companies that have enabled grid computing. Pacific Life (www.pacificlife.com) reportedly has built a grid. RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) Insurance Edition (www.rbcinsurance.com) replaced an existing application with a grid on IBM xSeries servers and middleware from Platform Computing (www.platform. com). Look what RBC says about grids: IBM and Platform Computing grid-enabled our valuation application and supporting infrastructure for immediate results, reports Keith Medley, RBC Insurance head of insurance technology. With the integrated solution, we have been able to reduce a 2.5-hour job to 10 minutes, and an 18-hour job to 32 minutes. We now are looking to move to a production environment. By virtualizing applications and infrastructure, we anticipate being able to deliver higher-quality services to our clients faster than ever before, which will significantly impact our competitive edge. Sounds interesting enough to deserve a further look.

So What About Grid Computing?
Grid definitions are like opinionseverybody has one, and they are all slightly different. In their 1998 book, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman wrote: A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities. They should know (the three big hitters in this field are Foster, Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke. Much of the information in this article is derived from their work), but lets simplify it a bit.