There seems to a quite a few grid computing frameworks out there, but which ones are actually being used to any great extent by the investment banks for purposes of low latency distributing calculation? I'd be interested to hear answers covering both windows,Linux and cross platform. Also, what RPC mechanisms seem to be favoured most?

I've heard that for reason of low latency and speed, the calculations themselves are quite often written in C++/C as calculations running on VMs are several orders of magnitude slower than native code. Does this seem to be a common scenario in practice? e.g distributed .NET grid framework running calculations written in native c++/c?