Powering and cooling data centers has always been one of the main challenges associated with data center operations. Businesses must have clean, reliable, steady, cost effective, and increasingly more “green” power solutions. New on-site generation systems such as microturbine technology may be the answer to the upcoming energy crisis we will soon be facing.

Help solve the worlds problems by donating your unused CPU cycles to solve complex computational challenges. Known as grid or distributed computing it allows you to share your CPU to perform units of work when your PC is sitting idle. Most machines actually sit idle for a majority of the time. The idea is to take advantage of that idle time and scavenge cpu cycles.

Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Grid computing has been around for over 12 years now and its advantages are many. Grid computing can be defined in many ways but for these discussions let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs (e.g. perl scripts, database queries, etc.) across a distributed set of resources instead of one central resource. In the past most computing was done in silos or large SMP like boxes. Even today you'll still see companies perform calculations on large SMP boxes (e.g. E10K's, HP Superdomes).

Ever wonder how Google and Yahoo!