Grid architectures, which are viewed as tools for the integration of distributed
resources, play a significant role as managers of computational resources, but
also as aggregators of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale
data acquisition platforms. The functionality of a grid architecture allows
managing, maintaining, and exploiting hetereogeneous instrumentation and
acquisition devices in a unifed way by providing standardized interfaces and
common work environments to their users. This result is achieved through the
properties of isolation from the physical network and from the peculiarites of
the instrumentation granted by standard middleware together with secure and
flexibile mechanisms which seek, access, and aggregate distributed resources.
This book focuses on a