"What do searching for extraterrestrials, curing cancer, and finding big prime numbers all have in common? These problems are all being attacked with grid computing, a a technique of breaking a large problem into small tasks that can be computed independently. While projects like Seti@home and The Greatest Internet Mersenne Prime Search have received plenty of press for using the Internet to distribute tasks to end users around the globe, grid computing also takes place in more controlled environments, such as research and financial settings. But it is by using the power of the Internet and the ability to discover and access idle processes on users' machines that grid computing (once called distributed computing), can access massive numbers of machines and processes.
What does all this have to do with Web services? The grid's principal tasks -- discovery and utilization of idle processes -- are best done over a ubiquitous protocol like HTTP. Although not tied to HTTP, Web services are effectively synonymous with HTTP and allow middleware components to be invoked using a verbose ASCII-formatted message. Web services provide a framework that is ideal for grid computing architectures. The Web services framework consists of UDDI for lookup and discovery, WSDL for service definition, and SOAP/HTTP for service invocation," says Eoin Lane in this OnJava.com article:
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