BOSTON - Grid computing continues to gain ground in enterprise IT as the technology proves its mettle solving practical business problems without requiring massive investments.

Companies such as Bank of America, Credit Suisse First Boston and Johnson & Johnson last week converged at the inaugural GridWorld conference in Boston, along with some 400 attendees, to talk technology and share experiences.

Touting the business benefits of grid, enterprise IT managers and industry watchers detailed the practical applications of the once mostly academic technology.

"Grid, combined with Web services , forms a new ecosystem that has broad applicability," said Robert Cohen, a fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute.

Michael Oltman, vice president of Advantage Risk Processing Development at Bank of America in Chicago, told attendees it took six months to develop a grid based on DataSynapse's Grid Server software that supports 80 CPUs. The resultant system reduced the time it takes to run one application from 90 minutes to 20 minutes, and another from four hours to 40 minutes.

Once that proved successful, Oltman said the bank started to scale it up, first to 150 servers, then 225 and then 600. The 90-minute job was reduced to 4 minutes, the four-hour job to 20 minutes.

Today, the bank has some 3,000 machines on the grid - including Citrix servers and desktops - spanning four locations.

Bank of America anticipates the grid will save tens of millions of dollars over three years, but other justifications are just as significant. The bank can run complex risk scenarios during the day instead of overnight, and the grid is inherently more stable because failure of any one component doesn't take the system down.

The grid also has dramatically improved system utilization. "We used to freak out if server utilization got up to 75%," he says. Now the bank is just concerned about whether it has enough servers. Utilization on the core servers is about 90%, 24 hours per day, and scaling up simply requires the addition of more blades.

Moths to flame

With grids becoming more mainstream, vendors such as IBM, Platform Computing, Sun, SAS and Univa are launching services, products and partnerships.

IBM used the show to announce that it will load its IBM eServer platforms running both AIX and Linux with Univa's version of the Globus grid application, which includes software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery and management along with security and file management (see story ). Big Blue separately announced services to verify applications as being grid ready.