Butterfly uses a "grid computing" approach, in which multiple servers work together as a virtual supercomputer, seamlessly shifting processing tasks among individual machines. IBM, which provides servers, physical space and software for the...
One reason is that standard products have gotten good enough for high-performance computing, and distributed computing mechanisms - clusters or grids (that link groups of computers) - have also gotten very good.
ESX Server is a piece of software that carves physical servers up into smaller virtual machines, allowing multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same Intel-based box. By running services in secure, isolated virtual machines, VMWare...
Distributed and grid computing have been of interest chiefly to the academic community, but it's becoming increasingly useful for commercial applications such as pharmaceutical research. The GIMPS effort involves loosely linked machines that only...
Networks of machines unwittingly infected by Trojan horses are a grid of sorts - though their intended use is far from academic. The grid of machines will makes constant requests against a list of sites maintained by SpamCop - effectively...
Grid computing is also an example of resource aggregation, as it enables the virtualisation of distributed IT resources such as storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles, while splitting a mainframe into logical partitions is an example of partitioning.
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