The University of Washington has announced two new research projects that will utilize cloud computing platforms to further research on ocean climate simulations and analyzing astronomical images. Both of these projects will utilize cloud computing to examine and interact with "the massive datasets that are becoming more and more common in science."

Physicists met to discuss plans to link supercomputing centers worldwide into a massive global grid that will help process super collider data.

A distributed supercomputer games network now in development could for the first time enable more than a million people to play graphics-rich games together via the internet. When the "Butterfly Grid" is up and running, its creators say that online games will run faster, be more reliable and may never need to shut down for maintenance.

Astronomers could be among the first to reap the rewards of plans to turn the internet into a vast pool of computer processing power. The three-year Astrogrid project is attempting to give astronomers a common way of accessing and manipulating diverse data archives.

As computer networks become cheaper and more powerful, a new distributed computing paradigm is poised to transform the practice of science and engineering.

An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips.

CERN researchers are turning to "Grid Computing" to achieve their goal of a "thousand times more computing power by 2006." They are developing the distributed-computing network to help process the 10 petabytes of data likely to be generated by the Large Hadron Supercollider.

Computers could be about to evolve from desktop beasts into something rather brighter. IBM has announced plans to start building the first "self-conscious" computer system - a network of super-computers so sophisticated that it could amount to a new form of life.

Forget supercomputers. The US Government is building an incredibly powerful computer. Next year it hopes to throw the switch on a massive distributed computing system, dubbed the Teragrid, that can carry out over 13 trillion calculations per second.

The National Science Foundation said it will spend $53 million to build a massive computing grid that will be the most powerful of its kind ever completed and could lead to ground-breaking research that would have otherwise taken years, if not decades, to complete.