"This is a source book for the history of the future." Vint Cerf, Senior Vice President, Internet Architecture and Engineering, MCI Communications The grid promises to fundamentally change the way we think about and use computing. This infrastructure will connect multiple regional and national computational grids, creating a universal source of pervasive and dependable computing power that supports dramatically new classes of applications. The Grid provides a clear vision of what computational grids are, why we need them, who will use them, and how they will be programmed. Inside The Grid Written by over 30 distinguished experts in high-performance computing and networking, including Francine Berman, Tom DeFanti, Jack Dongarra, Dennis Gannon, Roch Guerin, Ken Kennedy, Miron Livny, Paul Messina, Reagan Moore, Clifford Neuman, Larry Peterson, Jon Postel, and Daniel Reed. Edited by the winners of the prestigious 1998 Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation Awardan awards program characterized by U.S. Vice President Al Gore as "confirm[ing] our brightest hopes: that the positive uses of high technology will truly open up new opportunities for all Americans and improve our quality of life.

" Introduced by Larry Smarr, director of National Center for Supercomputing Applications and director of the National Computational Science Alliance, with a chapter that puts grids in context.