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The Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory is a software research and development group within the Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The lab is working towards realising this vision through its flagship project called Gridbus. The project name GRIDBUS (http://www.gridbus.org) is derived from its research theme: to create next-generation GRID computing and BUSiness technologies that power the emerging eScience and eBusiness applications. See also the point below.

In the framework of the GRIDBUS project, Alchemi (http://www.alchemi.net/) is a .NET-based grid computing framework (like the product by digipede); it provides the runtime machinery and programming environment to construct desktop grids and develop grid applications. It supports an object-oriented grid application programming model in addition to a grid job model. Cross-platform support of dedicated and non-dedicated grid nodes is provided via a web services interface.

Alchemi imitates traditional multi-threaded programming. In Alchemi, the smallest unit of parallel execution is a grid thread (object); a grid thread as very similar to a "normal" thread. Thus, a grid application is defined consists of a number of grid threads executing in parallel.

Alchemi is written for the .NET CLR; all machines running any Alchemi software component must have the .NET Framework installed. The Alchemi API is closely tied in with the .NET CLR and can only be used by .NET applications. However, Alchemi does offer support for execution of cross-platform applications via web services.

They claim that their "grid job" model can be used to write Grid middleware and applications that leverages Alchemi on any platform that supports web services like Gridbus Grid Server Broker. They have also promised to release a Java API soon. Alchemi is developed using .NET framework and seems quite similitar to the product by Digipede (see above).

Alchemi v.1.0.5 beta was released for .NET 2.0 in 2006-08-23.

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