Grid small and large: distributed systems and global communities

Summary form only given. Grid technologies seek to enable collaborative problem solving and resource sharing within distributed, multi-organizational virtual organizations. Two characteristics of Grid environments make the engineering of systems and applications particularly challenging. First, we face the familiar difficulties that arise when developing software that must provide reliability, performance, and security in environments that may be heterogeneous, unpredictable, unreliable, and hostile; second, we must allow this software to be deployed, operated, and evolved in an environment characterized by multiple participants with different and perhaps conflicting views on system function and design. The author presents the work that is being done to address these challenges.