A new computer trend, Grid computing, allows a group of computers to accomplish more together than any one computer could accomplish alone.

“The Grid community and many others believe that the Grid has the potential to change the world even more than the Web has done in the last decade,” said an article in the first issue of the Journal of Grid Computing, published in 2003.

Similar to how the nation’s electrical power grid directs electricity to the places with a greater demand for power, the Grid could direct a computer’s data-crunching power to wherever it was needed, according to a July/August 2002 article that appeared in IEEE Computing in Science and Technology.

The Grid could span time zones, allowing users to access resources in other time zones during peak hours, according to the article.

The Grid now exists in pieces, project-specific grids, just as the nation’s electrical power grid began as a system of regional power grids, it said.

“A grid is a communal system that allows users to share computing resources [for a project],” said Carl Carlson, senior in computer engineering.

“You need a service performed,” Carlson said. “Your computer can’t do it, but someone else’s can.”

The well-known SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @Home project is one grid, Carlson said.

The point of the SETI@Home project is to analyze signals from outer space for signs of intelligent life, a task too big for any one machine.

With the help of volunteer PC users around the world, however, the project has a grid with enough processing power to analyze those outer space signals, he said.

Users plug into the grid to offer the computer’s free time, or processor cycles, to the project.

Grid computing is a form of networking, according to a glossary at www.gridcomputingplanet.com.

At Iowa State, users plug into the campus network for Internet access, said Liz Blankenship, junior in computer engineering. ISU computer users can also share files over the network, she said.

Like the SETI@Home grid, the vast Grid of the future will be a network that shares more than the Internet and files, Blankenship said. The Grid will be a network that shares computing power, not just across campus, but across continents. Grids are developing in Europe, Japan and Australia as well as in the United States.

The Global Grid Forum, www.globalgridforum.com, meets three times a year to set standards for the Grid, keeping all the developing pieces of the Grid compatible with each other. Grid computing is one of the three topics that will be featured at the International Symposium on Modern Computing to be held at Iowa State Oct. 30 through Nov. 2.

The symposium is a one-time occasion in honor of the 100th birthday of John Vincent Atanasoff, an Iowa State professor who built the world’s first electronic digital computer.

Eli Rosenberg, professor and chair of physics and astronomy, is coordinating the Grid Computing portion of the Symposium. He could not be reached for comment.

Michael Ciccotti, sophomore in computer engineering, said he plans to attend the symposium.

“[The Grid] will be very useful,” Ciccotti said. “It’ll give a lot of under-funded projects access to computing power.”