Where did this name come from?

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was a Norwegian composer. He incorporated many folk tunes in his works. One well known composition is the Per Gynt Suite.

But why a composer?

In the early 1980's, the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University acquired its second VAX system. This exposed the need to have names for the systems (so that they could be discussed and accessed over the net). After some discussion, a schema was accepted to name systems after composers.

The owner of this system named his previous system, a Sun 3/50, Grieg. A second system, a salvaged HP 9000/310, was named Orff. Orff travelled to Seattle, but Grieg did not. When it came time to name this newly acquired system, the name Grieg was resurrected.

What was it?

A 486DX2/66 with 256 Kbyte cache and 32 Mbyte memory, a 14' color display, a 700 Mbyte disk, and a CD-ROM drive. It had two high speed modems (9600 and 14400 baud), an asynchronous multiplexer, and a dot matrix printer. It executed a fairly recent version of Linux.

What! That's ancient!

Yes, and it remained in service for over a decade because it kept doing its job. It's since been replaced by more corrent system.
Other systems in this collection have been named Sibelius, Glass, Joplin, and Orff. They are used in combination to test and evaluate network software.