This invaluable text provides a complete, clear, systematic, and practical understanding of the technologies that enable the Grid. The authors outline all the components necessary to create a Grid infrastructure that enables support for a range of wide-area distributed applications. The Grid: Core Technologies takes a pragmatic approach with numerous practical examples of software in context. It describes the middleware components of the Grid step-by-step, and gives hands-on advice on designing and building a Grid environment with the Globus Toolkit, as well as writing applications.

The Grid: Core Technologies:

• Provides a solid and up-to-date introduction to the technologies that underpin the Grid.
• Contains a systematic explanation of the Grid, including its infrastructure, basic services, job management, user interaction, and applications.
• Explains in detail OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture), Web Services technologies (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), and Grid Monitoring.
• Covers Web portal-based tools such as the Java CoG, GridPort, GridSphere, and JSR 168 Portlets.
• Tackles hot topics such as WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework), the Semantic Grid, the Grid Security Infrastructure, and Workflow systems.
• Offers practical examples to enhance the understanding and use of Grid components and the associated tools.

This rich resource will be essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students in computing and engineering departments, IT professionals in distributed computing, as well as Grid end users such as physicists, statisticians, biologists and chemists.

About the Author

Dr Maozhen Li is currently Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Engineering, in the School of Engineering and Design at Brunel University, UK. From January 1999 to January 2002, he was Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science, Cardiff University, UK. Dr Li received his PhD degree in 1997, from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. His research interests are in the areas of Grid computing, problem-solving environments for large-scale simulations, software agents for semantic information retrieval, multi-modal user interface design and computer support for cooperative work. Since 1997, Dr Li has published 30 research papers in prestigious international journals and conferences.

Dr Mark Baker is a hardworking Reader in Distributed Systems at the University of Portsmouth. He also currently holds visiting chairs at the universities of Reading and Westminster. Mark has resided in the relative safety of academia since leaving the British Merchant, where he was a navigating officer, in the early 1980s. Mark has held posts at various universities, including Cardiff, Edinburgh and Syracuse. He has a number of geek-like interests, which his research group at Portsmouth help him pursue. These include wide-area resource monitoring, messaging systems for parallel and wide-area applications, middleware such as information and security services, as well as performance evaluation and modelling of computer systems.
Mark’s non-academic interests include squash (getting too old), DIY (he may one day finish his house off), reading (far too many science fiction books), keeping the garden ship-shape and a beer or two to reduce the pain of the aforementioned activities.