This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second European AcrossGrid Conference, AxGrids 2004, held in Nicosia, Cyprus in January 2004.
The 27 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 57 submissions. The papers address the entire range of current topics in grid computing from computational and data grids to the semantic grid and grid application in various fields.
The 2nd European AcrossGrids Conference (AxGrids 2004) aimed to examine the state of the art in research and technology developments in Grid Computing, and provide a forum for the presentation and exchange of views on the latest grid-related research results and future work. The conference was organized by CrossGrid, a European Union-funded project on Grid research, GRIDSTART, the EU-sponsored initiative for consolidating technical advances in grids in Europe, and the University of Cyprus. It continued on from the successful 1st European Across Grids Conference, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in February 2003. AxGrids 2004 was run in conjunction with the 2nd IST Concertation Meeting on Grid Research, which brought together representatives from all EU-funded projects on Grid research for an exchange of experiences and ideas regarding recent developments in European grid research.
The conference was hosted in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, and attracted authors and attendees from all over Europe, the USA, and East Asia. The Program Committee of the conference consisted of 37 people from both academia and industry, and there were 13 external reviewers. Overall, AxGrids 2004 attracted 57 paper submissions (42 full papers and 15 short posters). Papers underwent a thorough review by several Program Committee members and external reviewers. After the review, the Program Chair decided to accept 26 papers (out of 42) for regular presentations, 8 papers for short presentations, and 13 papers for poster presentations. Accepted papers underwent a second review for inclusion this postproceedings volume, published as part of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Eventually, we decided to include 27 long and 3 short papers, which cover a range of important topics of grid research, from computational and data grids to the Semantic Grid and grid applications.
Here, we would like to thank the Program Committee members, the external reviewers, and the conference session chairs for their excellent work, which contributed to the high-quality technical program of the conference. We would also like to thank the University of Cyprus, IBM, GRIDSTART, and the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA) for making possible the organization of this event through their generous sponsorship. Special thanks go to Maria Poveda for handling organizational issues, to Dr. Pedro Trancoso for setting up and running the Web management system at the Computer Science Department at the University of Cyprus, and to Kyriacos Neocleous for helping with the preparation of the proceedings.
