Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us

James Reynolds considered the unused power available in the 350 Power Macintosh computers in the University of Utah's Student Computing Labs. Each night when the labs would close, the computers would sit idle. He and his co-workers wanted to tap into this potential power, but implementing a distributed computing system had not been a priority.

http://developer.apple.com/hardware/hpc/xgrid_intro.html