The grid grows up

The Grid's success to date owes much to the relatively early emergence of clean architectural principles, de facto standard software (in particular, the Globus Toolkit; www.globus.org), aggressive early adopters with challenging application problems, and a vibrant international community of researchers, developers, and users. We cannot hope to do justice to all aspects of this broad topic in a single theme issue, but the four articles in this theme section provide a good introduction to some of the concerns that drive current work on Grid deployment, applications, and research.