Grid computing is used today by many companies across a number of industries. Current IBM customer references for grid include Butterfly.net, a development studio, online publisher and infrastructure provider for massively multiplayer games that connect players on PCs, consoles and mobile devices. Butterfly grid consists of two clusters of approximately 50 IBM xSeries™ servers running in IBM hosting facilities. Specialized game servers and database servers are fully meshed over high-speed fiber-optic lines, enabling transparent routing of players to different servers in the grid. Another current reference for IBM grid computing is the University of Pennsylvania's groundbreaking National Digital Mammography Archive, which gives rapid retrieval of digital patient files from multiple locations in a secure environment. The University of Pennsylvania grid manages this huge volume of data, schedules traffic, and encrypts all image and information transmission using portal systems running almost exclusively on IBM hardware—including 16 distributed IBM Netfinity servers running Linux and Windows 2000. See Figure 11.1 for further illustration.
Figure 11.1. Examples of grid computing in use today worldwide.
