On and off I check on Sun's research projects to have a peek into what they're up to. You see, all the good stuff at Sun is classified as research project and they act like Xerox demoing stuff at anyone who cares at PARC until a handful of bright people comes along and starts a revolution... but I digress.

One of the projects I keep tabs on is Project Caroline (how's stupid is that? please name it something more meaningful like Sun Java Horizontal Scaling Services - yes, I'm taking a pot shot). Good thing it's moving forward, ableit in the same way as a glaciar. Here's a good description of what it's all about:

The platform takes care of the details of finding a machine for the process to run on, configuring the machine, network, and Internet connectivity. Operating system-level virtualization is used to isolate processes sharing the same physical machine while keeping per-process overhead low. Customer programs are expressed in languages like Java byte code, perl, and python that provide OS and instruction set independence. Other resources include IP sub-nets, network file systems, databases, external IP addresses, L4 and L7 load balancers, and DNS bindings. Applications can allocate, configure, and release these resources using the platform API. Through the platform API, applications can acquire and release resources in seconds.

How's that for a technical brief? Unfortunately access to the grid is available exclusively to select partners. Time to go try to pull some strings at Sun I guess.