What type of applications will the Grid be used for?

A simple answer is that just about anything you do on a computer you could also do on the Grid. After all, the Grid is, in some sense just a very big computer.

A more sophisticated answer is that the first big-time users of the Grid will probably be scientists with challenging applications that are simply too difficult to do on just one set of computers. After all, the Grid was originally conceived for these types of users, and is being built by them, too.

Difficult Problèmes computationnels can be categorized in different ways. With a computer scientist point of view, you divide them by looking at their general computational nature. Another way to categorize problems is by whether they are computation-centric, data centric or community-centric.But you can also look at the problems from the point of view of different application areas in science. Or you can look at the broader areas of application in industry, finance, government and civil society (link to grid&you).