Databases and the Grid: Who Challenges Whom?

An overview of e-Science and its data requirements exposes a number of challenges and opportunities. The Grid is an attempt to build a virtual abstract operating system, over an arbitrarily large globally distributed collection of heterogeneous resources. The Grid models of authentification, authorisation and accounting, aspire to delivering a single sign-on mechanism for access to this global computer. These models also support dynamic sharing and virtual organisations. The emerging model of composition is based on web services.