ABSTRACT
An early definition of e-science was ‘the large scale science increasingly carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet’ (www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/), with a stress on the Grid as an infrastructure for sharing computing resources and large collections of data. This is expressed visually within Figure 10.1, where resources might include for example computing power, databases and geographical services. Here, the Grid is a flexible crossorganizational network where communications occur on a machine-machine basis as opposed to the human-machine world of the Internet. Different ‘virtual organizations’ form and dissipate with each use of the network, and the choice of appropriate resources may itself be selected, as well as accessed, by machine rather than human.
