Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.

FORBES: Sun Plans To Close Its Data Centers

Main.net's system skips the high-voltage lines, injecting data into the grid further downstream, on medium-voltage (4, 000 to 25, 000 volts) lines.

FORBES: Technology

Densest GPU system architecture: NVIDIA GRID provides the highest number of concurrent, interactive data streams by using multi-GPU servers and sophisticated NVIDIA VGX GPU-sharing technology.

ENGADGET: NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing