Bigger than the Web

The popular press (well OK, IT Utility "Grid Has No Commerical Lock" and the Economist "One Grid to Rule Them All") this week bashed Grid Computing as the next big hype.  I don't get it.

Grid Computing to me is just a fancy way to say: more computing power at a fraction of the cost.  By leveraging 10s, 100s or 1000s of computers one can create a massive supercomputer.  As you read this blog, your computer is wasting 99.9%+ of it's computing cycles.  What can the world do with all that computing power?  A lot.

Since the dawn of time, whenever mankind has discovered a way to harness more computing processing capability (think back beyond the abacus), s/he has figured out a way to use it.  For instance, Intel, year after year, produces more and more powerful processors with their Pentiums I through IV. Each new chip begat a new application and billions in wealth starting with wordprocessing, then spreadsheets, databases, music, and finally video and telephonic applications.  With every uptick in computing power businesses and consumers have figured out how to use it and profit by it. 

In 2000, my fund seeded Datasynapse, a grid computing company based in New York.   I've been tracking their success for 4 years, as they won commerical customer after customer initially in their core market of financial services then on to energy, industrial and government sectors.   While some customers do research, most are just trying to make a buck.  Why buy $10 million in hardware when $1-2 million in software does a faster, more accurate and all around better job?

I will give the Economist some credit as they say in their final paragraph of the story, referring to CERN's (a nonprofit organization of scientists) grid research efforts:

"Yet sceptics beware. Twelve years ago, at a previous edition of the Interlaken conference, a young CERN engineer named Tim Berners-Lee gave out T-shirts advertising a new and rather obscure scientific-networking tool of dubious economic value: it was called the world wide web."

What they don't say is that it was an actual commercial company, Netscape, that profited the most immediately from that WWW discovery, and truly changed the computing landscape by commercializing it.    Press rewind and play for Datasynapse and their commercial application corporate for profit brethen on grid computing?  No offence to research institutions as they are big contributors to humanity and world knowledge, but I wouldn't bet on the CERN guys.