Grid technology really gets interesting when you look at efficiency of resource use, because no matter how many resources you have, there will always be times when a queue of people is waiting to use them.

SUBMITTING TO THE SHORTEST QUEUE

Grids allow you to allocate your work efficiently and automatically, spreading your many "jobs" among many resources. The result? Your jobs are finished much faster.

Computing grids rely on middleware to do this. Middleware uses information about the different "jobs" submitted to each queue to try to calculate the optimal allocation of resources.

Ideally, we need to know how many jobs are in each queue, and how long each job will take. This doesn't work perfectly yet, but then, neither did the Web in its early days (remember when they called it the World Wide Wait?!)