What is grid computing. Although "the Grid" is still just a dream... grid computing is already reality.
Imagine several million computers from all over the world, and owned by thousands of different people. Imagine they include desktops, laptops, supercomputers, data vaults, and instruments like mobile phones, meteorological sensors and telescopes... Now imagine that all of these computers can be connected to form a single, huge and super-powerful computer! World Community Grid. World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity.[3] Launched on November 16, 2004, it is funded and operated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD operating systems.[4][5][6] Using the idle time of computers around the world, World Community Grid's research projects have analyzed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, cancer, influenza, rice crop yields, and clean energy.
The organization has so far partnered with over 400 other companies and organizations to assist in its work and has over 78,500 active registered users as of April 2014.[2][7] CITI: pNFS. Linux pNFS features a pluggable client architecture that harnesses the potential of pNFS as a universal and scalable metadata protocol by enabling dynamic support for file layout format, storage protocol, and file system policies.
The architecture has been tested with the file, block, object, and PVFS2 access methods. pNFS Wiki.