There's fast and then there's real-time fast.

Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is out today with its newest Real Time Linux platform, MRG 1.1 boasting new performance, messaging and grid computing (cloud) capabilities.

The new MRG 1.1 platform marks the debut of Red Hat's commercially-supported grid technology, which helps users create their own enterprise clouds as well as leverage the power of Amazon's EC2 service.

Red Hat is also claiming significant performance gains with a new Real Time Linux kernel and improved messaging speeds in a bid to appeal to unique sectors such as government, military and financial services.

Real Time is a technical ideal for providing deterministic performance. It enables actions within the same amount of time, every time -- a feature critical for a number of industries including telecommunications, the military, healthcare and financial services.

"MRG 1.1 is a pretty big update for Red Hat," Bryan Che, product manager for Red Hat MRG, told InternetNews.com. "A big theme for the release is formal support for grids. We previously had support for messaging and real time, but grid was in tech preview."

Red Hat announced the MRG 1.0 platform in December of 2007. With the 1.1 release, Che noted that Red Hat added a full Web-based console for grid management as well as the ability to offload to an Amazon EC2 instance as well.

A computing grid is a distributed utility computing environment where multiple node contribute their compute resources. It's a term that lately has become intermingled with the popular term Cloud computing, which also pulls on distributed resources for compute power. As for why Red Hat its Grid instead of Cloud? Target markets.

Che noted that traditional high performance computing environments, such as financial services and research are used to calling distributed computing a grid.

"They don't think of their own workloads as a cloud because they've been doing it for years," Che added. "We call it a grid but depending on who we talk to we emphasize the point its not so much it's a grid but it's the ability to execute any time of computation from sub-second calculations to persistent applications," Che said.