Grids provide a means for solving computational expensive tasks in a more reasonable time frame than a single machine can offer. Be it prime factorisation or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by filtering background noise captured from space, applications for grids are plenty. To make use of a number of computers to process data in a distributed manner, some kind of software is necessary to coordinate the effort.

The Extensible Message and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is currently mostly used in the Instant Messaging domain. But its possible field of operation is much wider. Its extensibility allows for customisation to a great extent.

This project researches the usability of XMPP in a cluster-like environment to distribute data to a grid's nodes. These nodes carry out the actual processing and return the result.

During the life-span of this project jointly acting software components have been described and created to make arbitrary numbers of computers accessible and act cluster-like.

xmppgrid is a software framework that helps building grids. It is written in C++ and builds on top of gloox.