There has never been a peer-reviewed comparison between the much hyped GRID ruled by CERN, and say more discrete distributed supercomputers, like the Storm or K

There has never been a peer-reviewed comparison between the much hyped GRID ruled by CERN, and say more discrete distributed supercomputers, like the Storm or Kraken in terms of reliability, scalability (do you get spam?) configurability (how quickly does your new address get spam?). It would pail in comparison to the half dozen underground grids, not to mention a fair comparison with EC2, GOOG back-end etc. Actually, most experiments, doing "serious" work opted to have their own farms, which they can handle as they please (configuration, versioning etc. -- most of the grid is still struggling with RHEL3 and gcc3, most of what sane people cannot put up with). Parallelization amounts to breaking up data to chunks and running the same dll in multiple instances -- no notion of threading, let alone locking (no dependencies).