With the release of .NET 3.0 over a year ago Microsoft provided the missing pieces of technology necessary to build a grid computing platform on top of .NET. 

In certain distributed solutions the grid or batch computing is only a small part of the overall business process.  Take for example a payroll engine where distributing the paycheck calculations for each employee is followed by getting approval from a human and then printing the actual paychecks. 

A solution combining grid computing, SOA, human interaction and workflow was not possible without significant work in .NET until now.

Enter Aware Server.  Aware Server is service virtualization and grid computing platform for .NET 3.0 (and soon .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2008).  With Aware Server you have the ability to create business processes based on Windows Workflows and services based on Windows Communication Foundation.  All assemblies and code are deployed into a central repository and dynamically distributed to all machines that need it.  If updates occur to the binaries, etc. then all the nodes on the network automatically pull down the new bits.

The payroll process above distributes the paycheck processing to nodes on the network using our DistributedWorkflowReplicatorActivity and a term we call GridWorkflow.  Each paycheck is computed using its own Windows Workflow instance thus allowing complete visualization of the distributed process.

Another great example of the distributed process in need of such of a solution is the valuation of a trading portfolio for a financial firm.  Each deal in the portfolio can be distributed via the DistributedWorkflowReplicatorActivity.  In the risk valuation scenario each deal is valued using a different mathematical model and could have a custom tailored workflow associated with it just for valuation.  After processing of the deals is complete another activity in the business process (workflow) could initiate more distributed processing to compute Monte Carlo Value at Risk (VaR) thus bringing the entire end of day processing for risk management system into one business process.

Aware Server also has value-added distributed tasks and workflow activities for doing distributed Power Shell, Excel Services, and SQL Server Integration Services. 

The DistributedWorkflowReplicatorActivity and his more flexible brother DistributerReplicatorActivity both use Aware’s distributed service registry to dynamically find all the available DistributedProcessingService instances on the network to do the work on their behalf.  This means that to scale you simply provision another DistributedProcessingService and your business processes will immediately reap the benefits.