Well this came out of left field. Via Blue’s News comes word of IBM’s research prototype for a self-contained server system for the masses. From their website:

OptimalGrid is a research prototype of a grid-enabled collaboration framework, sophisticated management infrastructure, and problem-solving environment for grid computing that is designed to hide complexities of partitioning, distributing, and load balancing.

The goal of OptimalGrid is to simplify the creation and management of connected parallel applications on the grid by including important autonomic grid functionality in a middleware layer. Ideally, developers should be able to create grid-enabled parallel applications without themselves becoming experts in grid or high-performance computing. Grid applications should be able to automatically reconfigure themselves in response to dynamic changes in the grid environment.

Suddenly, every application is potentially massively multi-user. Why does this sound like a mess? And is the W3D ready for this?