A genomics company based in Cambridge, Mass., Cereon combines genomics research tools with high-speed computing to discover nature’s best genes for enhancing farmers’ crops. Historically, Cereon, established in 1997 as a subsidiary of St. Louis-based agriculture products provider Monsanto, ran gene-discovery applications on its largest mainframe. But advances in genomics tools and lab processes caused Cereon’s data production to expand at a fantastic rate, until it became too much for the mainframe to handle. "We were awash in terabytes," says Mark Trusheim, Cereon’s copresident and COO. "We have to discover our products quickly and be first to market, and our ability to understand the raw data created by all our genomics tools became a huge bottleneck in our research pipeline."

Cereon needed more computing power?fast. So it tapped into its existing Unix server architecture, bought a bunch of new boxes and networked a grid of processors in Cambridge and St. Louis into a virtual supercomputer that company researchers could use to submit jobs from their desktops. Specialized software from Platform Computing, a Markham, Ontario, company, broke large jobs into smaller computing tasks, distributed them among the CPUs in the grid and reassembled the results into a finished product. The grid was up and running by mid-2000, and Trusheim says it’s been a huge benefit. "It’s helped us optimize the use of the hardware we have, and we see less need to add," he says. "We’ve been saving millions of dollars of IT hardware cost over the last two years as we automatically load balance across processors and now physical data centers."

Cereon’s solution is not completely out of left field. The idea behind grid computing (historically known as distributed computing; see "Grid Computing...Defined?" on this page) has been around for years. It simply means submitting massive jobs into a dispersed network of computing resources to harness idle processor cycles for additional computing power on demand. Until the past couple of years, however, distributed computing has been primarily the province of academia and nonprofit research. But its new form, grid computing, is starting to emerge in a commercial context as well. Early adopters, including biotech companies, pharmaceutical makers and chip manufacturers, are building their own grids to handle complex problems. And once the technology matures?and if CIOs find applicable uses?adoption of grid computing will be more widespread, both within and among enterprises. Grid proponents’ ultimate goal is a worldwide grid, similar to the electric power system, which users can access over the Internet through service providers on a pay-as-you-need basis.