They do not necessarily give higher computing power for a given application than the largest parallel supercomputers, but they do enable maximal exploitation of existing resources. This is particularly important in the middle range of computing where many computers and clusters are linked over a wide-area network providing a very flexible environment and making use of systems which otherwise would only be lightly loaded. This however raises serious problems of security and authentification, and demands a level of collaboration rarely seen in facility management. Indeed this may become a major success of the technology. It contains a large amount of background material and descriptions of past and current projects by 30 expert authors.
Power grids provide more than just computational resources.
They are fundamental in funding solutions to challenging problems such as smart instruments, collaborative engineering or data mining. NetSolve is a large research project driven from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory by Jack Dongarra et al. Other network software includes NEOS and NetLink. The NEOS network package, is specifically designed for optimisation problems.