Europe may have as much as an 18-month lead over the U.S. in deploying the advances in grid computing. It is preparing to start two major initiatives in early 2004.

Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe aims to build the largest international grid infrastructure to date, operating in more than 70 institutions throughout Europe, providing a 24-hour computing capacity comparable to 20,000 of today’s most powerful personal computers.

The other is a distributed supercomputing project that will connect seven supercomputers in Europe at optical network speeds.

The Europeans are ready to move to 40 gigabits a second transmission speed, relying in part on dark (unused) fiber.

In the U.S. next year, the TeraGrid project is expected to offer computing speeds of up to 20 trillion mathematical operations a second and the ability to store a petabyte of information.