Grid offers scalability in other ways as well. Alain Benoist, CIO for Debt Finance SociŽtŽ GŽnŽrale Corporate and Investment Banking, says his group moved into grid late last year to help it more rapidly create new financial derivative products as well as to provide faster modeling of the company’s market exposure (or "value at risk") for regulatory purposes. But for him, scalability also meant the chance to ease the transition from model to final product.

"The people who are developing the pricing models for derivatives are not people who would feel at home on a supercomputer," Benoist says. Instead, they develop the derivative models using PC-based tools such as spreadsheets. The models are then implemented in common PC programming languages and tested. The ones that pass muster can then be integrated into production applications that can be run on the grid.

But for many companies, scalability and processing power are only half the grid equation. The other half is finding ways to take better advantage of the equipment you already have.

How Your PCs Can Be All That They Can Be

Estimates vary, but the average desktop PC is actually doing something worthwhile less than 20 percent of the time. Some estimates go as low as 5 percent. Yet companies still feel compelled to buy new server hardware capable of dealing not with the average load but with the spikes. Grid promises to solve that problem by putting those idle CPUs to use 40 percent, 50 percent or even 80 percent of the time. And Sunil Joshi, vice president of software technologies and computer resources at Sun Microsystems, claims 98 percent utilization.

Joshi doesn’t claim that achieving this degree of efficiency is easy, but he does say that through years of practice, his group, which manages computing resources for SPARC processor design at Sun, has turned the maximization of some 10,000 grid-enabled CPUs into a "fine art." His group even plans the timing of bringing machines down for routine maintenance to minimize any negative utilization impact.

Joshi has an advantage in that many engineering applications have been grid-enabled for years. As a result, his group can tune what applications run where to take maximum advantage of every machine. For instance, a machine could run one application that handles a lot of input and output (I/O) for a database while another, more computation-intensive application hammers the same system’s CPU. The goal is to have enough types of applications?high priority and low, CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive?to fill every unused gap, no matter how small, in every grid-connected computer.