As is becoming commonly known, there is an explosion happening in the amount of scientific data that is publicly available. One challenge is how to make productive use of this data. This talk will discuss some parallel and distributed computing projects, centered around virtual astronomy, but also including other scientific data-oriented realms. It will look at some specific projects from the past, including Montage(1), Grist(2), OurOcean(3), and SCOOP4, and will discuss the distributed computing, Grid, and Web-service technologies that have successfully been used in these projects.