Optical networks have been pointed out as strong candidates to ensure energy-efficiency in the Internet backbone, as well as the distributed applications such as computational grids. In this paper, we propose a distributed framework to address energy-efficient lightpath establishment problem for computational grids over the optical WDM backbone. Each backbone node maintains two thresholds to determine its sleep/wakeup cycle. A node in the sleep mode saves energy by rejecting transient traffic. Each demand is routed based on anycast routing and with the objective of minimum power consumption. Through numerical results, we show that significant energy savings are attained by the proposed framework without requiring centralized information and control. We further show that coordinated sleep and wakeup management in the optical backbone can address the trade-off between propagation delay and energy savings. © 2012 IEEE.