Let me just repeat the ideas that we were exploring the other day before adding the rest of the things

Monetizing Grid Computing - We wanted to come up with a new model to monetize grid computing in a way that we make sure that the end users who contribute their computing power(processing power/storage space(veera)) get compensated according to their level of contribution.

Basically we will be creating the link between the end users who have the computing power and the organisations which need that processing power to do their research and analysis.

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What is a grid?

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally-intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic analysis, and back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and web services.

I basically copied this from wiki. This was the best definition i could find online and do read up on the website : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing if you want to know more about the other forms which are quite similar like cloud computing, cluster computing, edge computing and many more.

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Market : 

The Market's strong player seems to IBM with all its various Grid solutions that it sells to various big corporations

-Oracle has its $1 per CPU hour platform which sells usage of their powerful servers to various organisations.

-ofcourse there are loads more startups who work in that area of grid computing and are getting funded by various VCs.

-As far as i have researched, other than for charity purposes, no company has made it open to the public in which the end users get to earn money out of it.

-We can target Big Corporations which are doing research or analytics like those in Banking, Finance, Economics, Engineering, Bio-tech, Medicine and alot more.

Competitors in Grid Storage:

-http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/wuala-launches-public-beta-tomorrow/

Wuala and a few more companies already have this idea of storing space online. I haven't read about how they do it, but they do use storage space from various users and share it with the world.

-They are not offering it to companies and big corporations though. That might be an area we might want to work on or think about.

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Others:

One interesting software that i came across is this opensource software called Globus Toolkit 3.0 which is sort of considered a standard in Grid Computing and they give total access over the software and how it is used. So anyone can take it, manipulate it and make money out of it essentially.

Remarks from Applied Biosystems which bought grid computing from Sun

<http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Enterprise-Planning/Grid-Computing-Buying-Computing-Power-by-the-Hour/>

Some of the definitions about what makes a grid a grid (rather than just a large computer cluster) talk about the ability for computing jobs to cross organizational boundaries. De La Vega and his team had to package up their Perl and C++ data analysis code, along with the source data, upload it into Sun's infrastructure, run it, and retrieve the results.

First, they spent a week doing test runs to make sure the software would work the same on Sun's computers that it did on their own — something they couldn't take for granted, given that Sun's infrastructure featured 64-bit processors and the software had been written for 32-bit chips. They had to consider that some subtle difference — for example, in the handling of floating-point integers — would throw off the mathematics of their calculations, De La Vega says. But when no significant glitches cropped up, they charged ahead.

In a couple of respects, Applied Biosystems didn't quite fit the business and technology assumptions of the Sun Grid.

To make it easy for firms to buy grid computing power on an ad hoc basis, Sun offers it for purchase by credit card, through the same Web portal used to submit and control computing jobs.

But the Applied Biosystems finance people insisted on cutting a purchase order for the estimated 36,000 CPU-hours De La Vega estimated would be consumed by analysis of newly-released genetic data from the National Institutes of Health.

It turned out he had over-estimated, leaving the company with a credit of 10,000 hours to use on a future project. That's not a problem, he says, as he expects to quickly find a few other projects he can speed to completion using the Sun Grid.

One other assumption that didn't quite match was Sun's idea that customers would simply download their data over the Internet when a job finishes.

But the "verbose" data output format of the Applied BioSystems software made that impractical, so De La Vega instead asked Sun to download compressed data onto a USB hard drive and ship it back to him.

Overall, it was a good experience. In terms of the technical challenges of parallel programming, it was nothing new for his staff, De La Vega says, "but now it's easy to get access to these extra cycles at a very low cost, rather than paying for the overhead of having the computer power in house whether you use it or not."