The Grid Appliance is a self-configuring Virtual Machine appliance that is used to create ad-hoc pools of computer resources both within a local-area and across wide-area networks to execute high-throughput, long-running jobs.
Appliances are connected to each other through a peer-to-peer virtual network using private IP addresses called IPOP. Upon starting the appliance, it is automatically connected to a pool of resources and is capable of submitting and executing jobs using the Condor Grid scheduler. Integration with the Hadoop map/reduce framework is ongoing.
The Grid appliance's virtual network features decentralized NAT traversal over UDP, a decentralized DHCP service supporting multiple address spaces, and self-configuring Condor pools using a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). Currently, a public infrastructure for bootstrapping such pools is running on PlanetLab; deployments on private resource pools are also supported.|||||http://grid-appliance.org