The Distributed Computing Column covers the theory of systems that are composed of a number of interacting computing elements. These include problems of communication and networking, databases, distributed shared memory, multiprocessor architectures, operating systems, verification, internet, and the web. This issue consists of the paper "Distributed Computing Research Issues in Grid Computing" by Henri Casanova. Many thanks to Henri for contributing to this issue. Request for Collaborations:

more »

... ease send me any suggestions for material I should be including in this column, including news and communications, open problems, and authors willing to write a guest column or to review an event related to theory of distributed computing. Abstract Ensembles of distributed, heterogeneous resources, or Computational Grids, have emerged as popular platforms for deploying large-scale and resource-intensive applications. Large collaborative efforts are currently underway to provide the necessary software infrastructure. Grid computing raises challenging issues in many areas of computer science, and especially in the area of distributed computing, as Computational Grids cover increasingly large networks and span many organizations. In this paper we briefly motivate Grid computing and introduce its basic concepts. We then highlight a number of distributed computing research questions, and discuss both the relevance and the shortcomings of previous research results when applied to Grid computing. We choose to focus on issues concerning the dissemination and retrieval of information and data on