adminz
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as I forward it ...

the grid (aka distributed computing)

note: these are listed above, I listed them again separately as I think "the grid" is an important thing (it's called "cloud computing" these days).

Grids promise to revolutionise computing, just as the internet revolutionised communications. Grids are large-scale clusters of computers, working together. Tasks are split into many small chunks - possibly millions or trillions of chunks - and are then shipped over the net to participating computers for execution. The computer ships the result back when it's done. This effectively creates a single computer from millions of smaller computers. The massive processing power that results can be used for the most pressing and computationally-intensive tasks, such as climate change simulation, medical and physics research.