INTRODUCTIONDistributed computing harnesses the power of many computers, or clusters of computers, to provide a virtual supercomputer. Applications that are otherwise infeasible to run on individual computers today can be run by distributing the workload over a large network of computers within an organisation or across multiple organisations.Grid computing, a form of distributed computing, has become a hot topic recently. Distributed computing is the process of aggregating the power of several computing entities to collaboratively run one or more tasks in a transparent and coherent way.Grid computing is an innovative approach that enhances existing IT infrastructure to aggregate resources and manage data and compute-intensive application workloads. It is the process of utilizing various resources, such as data and computational power of distributed entities to cooperatively, concurrently and transparently execute a single and huge task, so that they appear as a single system. Buyya defines a grid [1] as:"a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed autonomous resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements."Grids enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of resources including supercomputers, personal computers, storage systems, data sources, and specialised devices that are geographically distributed and generally owned by different organizations. Grid-based systems can be used to solve large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce [2].A number of factors have led to the development of Grid systems. The main factors are the availability of low-cost, high-speed personal computers, and specifically, those that are being used as workstations. These workstations are often idle, resulting in available processor power being wasted.Grid technology grew out of the needs of high-performance computing (HPC) applications from the scientific and academic communities and has since matured to be gradually adopted by enterprises and businesses.A great many of current multimedia applications need huge compute power. For example, applications like imagerendering, using ray-tracing techniques take a long time to produce high quality results and need more than one high powered resource to complete the job. This paper looks closely at one such application, which was originally not

Session IX continued the presentation and discussion of multimedia research projects from Session VI. It showed a very diverse set of approaches, but integration of new media in the existing workstation environment was a common theme to all of them. Only some fraction of the session can be captured in this summary because three of the four speakers made use of video presentations (Andy Hopper did not even have a paper) or even plugged their PC into the projector (Klaus Meissner).