Office Grid Based on Windows PCs

Recently, the performance of PCs has increased as hardware (HW) technology has evolved. HW resources are, however, almost always idle; and therefore, we propose a grid that uses these idle resources efficiently.As Windows PCs are not usually used in creating grids,we have researched a Windows-based grid (called the Windows Grid), but so far without an application. In this paper, we propose the Office Grid, which uses office applications over a grid. We have developed a document converter from Microsoft Office to plain text as an example. Such an application is usually used in a search engine. We first describe how to implement and use the Office Grid and then we evaluate it.