like Dante?

[soundtrane]

http://www.waves.com/live-sound/soundgrid

[Wandering Ear]

More like distributed processing.  Cubase used to do this a lot (maybe still does?? been a while since I've used it).  Allow you to run resource heavy plugins on dedicated machines on the network, freeing up the resources on your main rig.

[nickreich]

like Dante? Well, a little bit like Dante if you are wanting to get large numbers of channels into / out of a computer. The intent of the product is, like Wandering Ear said, to enable users to run Waves plugins on a console or DAW that doesn't support them by sending the audio to and from an external compute running SoundGrid server. DiGiCo are partnering Waves in this because they are losing users in the Live Sound world to Avid Venue systems, which does allow engineers to use plugi-in effects they may be familiar with from the Studio. To make this work, the SoundGrid system includes an Ethernet sound driver similar to the Dante Virtual Soundcard in concept, and they have several hardware converters from other standards, such as MADI, which could be used as an alternative to Dante in some applications. They don't appear to be concentrating as much on the large-scale distributed audio networking thing that Dante is pretty much the leader at, right now.

[ccsnd]

Newer live sound systems include high channel effect loops (madi or otherwise) to connect to host systems (daw or standalone) to allow you to use your plugin's in a live environment.

 

It's a quickly evolving part of the audio industry, and there are a lot of interesting things happening.