A few years ago, I had a series of meetings with CIOs and CTOs in New York City. I asked them all the same question: "Do you feel the grid you're building is delivering a competitive advantage to your business?" (When we talk about a computer grid, we ordinarily mean a private collection of low-cost network, storage, computing, and software elements, lashed together to do complicated computing work that historically required multimillion-dollar data centers.)

I asked the same question of researchers and executives in the energy industry, which is using grids to find oil; the life sciences, where grids help in drug discovery; the motion picture industry, where grids are used to render complex effects and animation; and academia, where grids are supporting all sorts of innovative science.