Preface to the Special Issue on Grid Data Management

Abstract

Initially developed for the scientific community, Grid computing is now breaking into other important fields such as enterprise information systems, thus making data management more critical than ever. New Grid applications are characterized with high heterogeneity, high autonomy and large-scale distribution of computing and data resources. Managing and transparently accessing large numbers of autonomous, heterogeneous data resources efficiently is an open problem. Furthermore, different Grids may have different requirements with respect to autonomy, query expressiveness, efficiency, quality of service, fault-tolerance, security, etc. Thus, different solutions need be investigated, ranging from extensions of distributed and parallel computing techniques to more decentralized, self-adaptive techniques such as Peer-to-peer (P2P). This special issue on Grid data management is based on papers selected from the International Workshop on High-Performance Data Management in Grid Environments (HPDGrid 2006), co-located with the VecPar Conference, July 13, 2006, Rio de Janeiro (http://vecpar.fe.up.pt/hpdg06). HPDGrid 2006 brought together researchers and practitioners from the high-performance computing, distributed systems and database communities to discuss the challenges and propose novel solutions in the design and implementation of data management in Grid environments. This special issue includes four papers which reflect the main discussions and results of the workshop. All four papers have been reviewed according to the rules of JOGC (the first paper was directly handled by the editor-in-chief). The first paper “Grid Data Management: open problems and new issues,” by Esther Pacitti, Patrick Valduriez and Marta Mattoso, is an introduction to the special issue, focusing on the main open problems and new issues related to Grid data management. First, it recalls the main principles behind data management in distributed systems and the basic techniques. Then, it makes precise the requirements for Grid data management and discusses the main techniques needed to address these requirements. This implies revisiting distributed database techniques in major ways, in particular, using P2P techniques. The second paper “Enterprise Grids: Challenges Ahead,” by Ricardo Jimenez-Peris, Marta PatinoMartinez and Bettina Kemme, discusses the use of Grid technology in enterprise computing where the Grid is viewed as a new architecture for data centers. The paper identifies the significant gap between what is required by enterprise Grids and what is currently J Grid Computing (2007) 5:271–272 DOI 10.1007/s10723-007-9078-4