The trend is to have your own "personal super computer" allowing testing of code and running of smaller jobs quickly and easily
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Personal Supercomputers Promise Teraflops on Your Desk

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/personal-supercomputers/

About a year ago John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues found a way to bypass the long waits for computer time at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

My latest copy of the IEEE magazine has the following articles that may be of use to you, "grid enthusiast":
Computing Practices
The Real Cost of a CPU Hour by Edward Walker

IT Professional: Cloud Computing
Navigating the Next-Generation Application Architecture by Chuck Hutchinson, Jeff Ward, and Karen Castilon

It All Depends
Data Security in the World of Cloud Computing by Lori M. Kaufman

Computing in Science and Engineering: Cloud Computing
SQL in the Clouds by James L. Johnson

9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid
The Eucalyptus Open-Source Cloud-Computing System by Daniel Nurmi, Rich Wolski, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli, Sunil Soman, Lamia Youseff, and Dmitrii Zagorodnov

From the CHPC : the announcement of this year's conference in Johannesburg.

We are pleased to invite you to the CHPC National Meeting 2009 and 5th BELIEF Symposium to be held during the period 7-9 December2009 at the Sandton International Convention Centre. For more information and registration, visit http://www.chpcconf.co.za .

The event is hosted by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and Bringing Europe’s eLectronic Infrastructure to Expanding Frontiers - Phase II (BELIEF II).

So, it's a shameless plug, but we are in the news this week at "Feature - SAGrid: A view from the coordinator’s chair" note... sagrid.ac.za will soon be up with the new website...

Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute in Pretoria is the Coordinator for planning the upcoming South Africa Grid initiative — which will draw upon the resources of South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing and the country’s high-speed network, SANREN. Here, he gives an update of the status of the project.

A lovely article on massive data centres and their issues. (By TOM VANDERBILT
Published: June 8, 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/06/14/magazine/20090614-search-slideshow_index.html

This guy deserves a medal!
http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/category/bmow1/

Here’s a summary of the project, for everyone following the link from the article.

Big Mess o’ Wires 1 is an original CPU design. It does not use any commercial CPU, but instead has a custom CPU constructed from dozens of simple logic chips. Around this foundation is built a full computer with support for a keyboard, sound, video, and external peripherals.

( 1 ) What is your HPC system being used for?
Computational Fluid Dynamics and Nuclear engineering analysis

( 2 ) How many blades, CPUs and cores are you using?
40 DL160G5 servers, (2 x Intel Xeon quad-core E5472@3GHz and 16GB ram each)
2 DL580 utility nodes, (4 x Intel Xeon quad-core X7350@2.93GHz and 64GB ram)

( 1 ) What is your HPC system being used for?

Computing CNC tool paths from images.

( 1 ) What is your HPC system being used for?

It was used for Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis work for Team Shosholoza, South Africa's America's Cup Sailing Team.