This volume collects revised versions of some of the papers presented at the S- ond IST/FET International Workshop on Global Computing held in Rovereto, Italy (9-12 March, 2004). The workshop involved all the thirteen projects funded under the IST/FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING: AGILE; CRESCCO; DART; DBGLOBE;DEGAS;FLAGS;MIKADO;MRG;MYTHS;PEPITO;PROFUN- DIS; SECURE; SOCS. The ?rst aim of the GLOBAL COMPUTING initiative is the development of paradigms for building ?exible, dependable, secure, robust and e?cient systems. Primaryresearchconcernsaretheco-ordination,interaction,security,reliability, robustness, and risk control of the entities in the global system. The ultimate goaloftheresearchactionistoprovideasolidscienti?cfoundationforthedesign of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving e?ective principles for building and analysing them. Theworkshopcoveredtopicsrelatedtoprogrammingenvironments,dynamic recon?guration, resource guarantees, peer-to-peer networks, analysis of systems and resources, resource sharing, and security, as well as foundational calculi for mobility. The present collection o?ers a rich sample of research results on the above subjects.
We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni of the University of Trento for partially funding the workshop, and the Events and Meetings O?ce of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration.