1. What is the Grid? There are certain scientific tasks, which need more computing power than a single PC, workstation, or server can provide.  A keen innovation began in the ’70s, aimed to build a multiprocessor computer, these computers with prominent speed were called supercomputers. With the increasing development of science and technology, the supercomputer became a necessary instrument, because the new projects and models needed bigger and bigger computing capacity. Today even the supercomputers with the speed of several teraflops cannot satisfy the emerging claims. The Grid applications put together the unused CPU capacity of computers connected to the Internet in order to make a huge virtual supercomputer. In the Grid network, the most different, remote devices can be connected. The system uses the existing but not exploited capacity of after hours computers, or certain equipment not fully used. Many analyst think that the next generation of web will be based on the Grid systems, where not only the information can be public or shared, but the services needed to process the information. This approach opens new perspectives in information sharing and processing. 2. Employing the Grid Most common fields and modeling tasks where supercomputers are being used: Machine industry, architecture – statical and mechanical research Car and airplane manufacturing – exchange wind tunnel and accident experiments Cosmetic enterprises – agent research, avoiding animal tests Humane medical research – check before human test phase, cell metabolism modelling, solving gene function Business sphere, insurance companies – risk analysis, modeling economic and sociological phases Meteorology – weather forecast, climate modelling Space research, astronomy, geology – picture and mark processing Cell phone suppliers – network optimization Nuclear energetics industry – functional parametric examination Military organisations – optimizing team movements 3. Operating the Grid (source: CERN) Well, if you are a scientist, and you want to run a colleague's molecular simulation program, you would no longer need to install the program on your machine. Instead, you could just ask the Grid to run it remotely on your colleague's computer. Or if your colleague was busy, you could ask the Grid to copy the program to another computer, or set of computers, that were sitting idle somewhere on the other side of the planet, and run your program there. In fact, you wouldn't need to ask the Grid anything. It would find out for you the best place to run the program, and install it there. And if you needed to analyse a lot of data from different computers all over the Globe, you could ask the Grid to do this. Again, the Grid could find out where the most convenient source of the data is without you specifying anything, and do the analysis on the data wherever it is. And if you wanted to do this analysis interactively in collaboration with several colleagues around the world, the Grid would link your computers up so it felt like you were all on a local network. This would happen without you having to worry about lots of special passwords, the Grid could figure out who should be able to take part in this common activity. You may have heard about SETI@home. Based at the University of California - Berkeley, SETI@home is a virtual "supercomputer" which analyses the data of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Using the Internet, SETI brings together the processing power of more than 3 million personal computers from around the world, and has already used the equivalent of more than 600.000 years of PC processing power! SETI@home is a screen-saver program - i.e. it works without impacting normal use of the computer - and any owner of a PC can download it from the Web. The different PCs (the nodes of such Grid) work simultaneously on different parts of the problem, retrieving chunks of data from the Internet and then passing the results to the central system for post-processing.