Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are contributing to a large amount of the global electricity consumption. Due to tremendous increase in the bandwidth demands and utilisation of non-renewable energy resources Greenhouse Gas Emissions are increasing proportionally with the increasing demand. Despite their advantages in terms of computing performance, distributed applications such as computational grids are major factors that increase the traffic volume in the Internet. In this paper, we propose a distributed framework to ensure energy savings in the optical WDM backbone which transport the traffic between nodes and several computational grids based on anycast routing. According to the proposed framework, the backbone nodes go to sleep mode and resume active mode in a distributed manner with the objective of maximum energy savings in the backbone. Each node maintains two thresholds which are adaptively adjusted based on the network performance, and these thresholds play the key role in determining the decision of a node whether to sleep or resume. Numerical results confirm that the proposed framework can ensure significant energy savings in the network when compared to the conventional energy-unaware operation mode. We further show that the adoption of the proposed network framework does not degrade significantly the network performance in terms of average blocking probability and end-to-end delay. © 2012 IEEE.