| Summary: | Part of a special section on technology. Ambitious efforts are underway to combine millions of computers around the world to make processing power available on demand anywhere. Computer engineers and scientists are aiming to create what they call the Grid, which is in effect, a set of software tools that, when combined with clever hardware, would allow users to tap processing power from the Internet as easily as electrical power can be drawn from an electricity grid. The creation of the Grid could hugely benefit the many scientific problems that require truly enormous amounts of computation. Peer-to-peer computing, which is what the pooling of computer resources has been termed, represents in many ways a very early stage of the Grid concept and offers a good impression what a fully operational Grid could do. When the Grid is finally created it will leave obsolete much of the computing world as it currently exists.
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