From Byte and Switch: Sun Microsystems is making a serious push to become the grid computing vendor of choice for Wall Street: "The Holy Grail for Sun, at least as far as grid computing is concerned, is the financial sector. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm is keen to tap the immense compute and storage demands of Wall Street firms, but it faces stiff competition from rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which have already made inroads into this space."

At the Web Services on Wall Street conference this week, one IT director of a leading Wall Street investment bank talked up the appeal of grid computing (but only on the condition of anonymity): "There is a market for the Sun grid strategy... It could be particularly relevant for areas such as mortgage analysis and credit derivatives where calculations need to be done in a timely manner."