Today, applications are developed to be geared toward a specific platform or hosting environment, for example Linux, Windows 2000, various UNIX
flavors, mainframes, J2EE, Microsoft .NET and so on. Such computing tends to operate within a monolithic framework in which applications contend for
resources as and when they’re made available for that single platform. For a platform with limited resources, the resource availability starts
decreasing as the demand for service grows. At such a time, if resources from other systems could be used or, in turn, the requirements could be
serviced by resources from other systems, the strain on the native system would reduce considerably and the quality of service being offered would
improve.
Link: linuxjournal.com
