According to John Patrick, IBM's vice-president for Internet strategies, "thenext big thing will be grid computing."The purpose of this book will be to describe several interesting and uniqueaspects of this exciting new topic. Grid Computing is a type of parallel anddistributed system set-up that enables and encourages the sharing ofgeographically dispersed resources. In many ways, it represents theconvergence of supercomputing and web services. The book highlights manyachievements in this innovative computer science field, and it is intended to beof value to a wide spectrum of readers around the world regardless. IBM israpidly establishing itself as the global leader in the topic of Grid Computing.This book not only address IBM's leadership progress in the field, but otherglobal enterprise initiatives, specific areas of interests, synergies between manyenterprise partners in this field, and current/future deliveries in the field ofGrid Computing. Today, there is no other book like this one that explains thepromise and IBM's plans for this important initiative.