I am looking to do some quite processor-intensive brute force processing for string matching. I have run my prototype in a multi-threaded environment and compared the performance to an implementation using Gridgain with a couple of nodes (also multithreaded).

The performance I observed was that my Gridgain implementation performed slower to my multithreaded implementation. It could be the case that there was a flaw in my gridgain implementation, but it was only a prototype, and I thought the results were indicative. So my question is this:

What are the advantages of having to learn and then build an implementation for a particular grid platform (hadoop, gridgain, or EC2 if going hosted - other suggestions welcome), when one could fairly easily put together a lightweight compute grid platform with a much shallower learning curve?...i.e. what do we get for free with these cloud/grid platforms that are worth having/tricky to implement?

(Please note, I don't have any need for a data grid)

Cheers,

-James

(p.s. Happy to make this community wiki if needbe)