Grid computing offers a way to solve Grand Challenge problems such as protein folding, financial modeling, earthquake modeling, and climate/weather modeling, and was integral to building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Grids offer a way to make optimal use of information technology resources within an organization. They also provide a means to offer information technology as a utility to commercial and non-commercial customers, with those customers paying only for what they use, such as electricity or water.
As of October 2016, more than 4 million computers running the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) open source platform are members of the World Community Grid.
The European Union funds projects through framework programs in the European Commission . BEinGRID (Business Experiments on the Grid) was a research project funded by the European Commission as an integrated project under the sponsorship program of the Sixth Framework Program (FP6). Started on June 1, 2006, the project lasted 42 months, until November 2009. The project was coordinated by Atos Origin. According to the project newsletter, their mission is “to establish effective routes to promote the adoption of grid computing in the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using grid technologies”. To extract best practices and common themes from the pilot implementations, two teams of consultants are analyzing a series of pilot projects, one technical, the other business.
The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, based in the European Union and including sites in Asia and the USA, was an extension of the European DataGrid (EDG) project and evolved into the European Grid Infrastructure . It, along with the LHC Computational Grid (LCG), was developed to support experiments using the CERN Large Hadron Collider . A list of active sites participating in the LCG can be found online, as well as real-time monitoring of the EGEE infrastructure. Relevant software and documentation are also publicly available. There is speculation that dedicated fiber optic links, such as those installed by CERN to meet the LCG’s data processing needs, may one day become available to home users, thereby providing Internet services at speeds up to 10,000 times faster than a traditional broadband connection. The European network infrastructure has also been used for other research activities and experiments such as modeling oncology clinical trials.
The distribution.net project was started in 1997. NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) ran genetic algorithms using the Condor loop garbage collector running on about 350 Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations .
In 2001, United Devices managed the United Devices Cancer Research Project based on its Grid MP product , which cycles clean volunteer computers connected to the Internet. The project ran on approximately 3.1 million machines before closing in 2007.