Special Section: Defining the grid, experiences and future trends

Some significant paper were submitted on grid computing through a peer review process for the special issue of the journal, Future Generation Computer Systems. E. Huedo, R. S. Montero and I. M. Llorente presented a new approach and an implementation for Grid resource management and meta-Scheduling. They presented a recursive architecture that supports an arbitrary number of levels in the resource and scheduling hierarchy in the pursuit of autonomy, scalability, ease of deployment and security. T. Kosar and M. Balman discussed the resource management problem from the point of view of data intensive applications. In this context, data-aware schedulers are important for effective data placement and subsequent access. A. Asiki, K. Doka, I. Konstantinou, A. Zissimos, D. Tsoumakos, N. Koziris and P. Tsanakas described a service-oriented middleware architecture which enables efficient data management by employing GridTorrent and peer-to-peer technology to achieve scalability and reliability.