The state of computer and networking technology today makes the seamless sharing of computing resources on an international or even global scale conceivable. Scientific computing Grids that integrate large, geographically distributed computer clusters and data storage facilities are being developed in several major projects around the world. This article reviews the status of one of these projects, Enabling Grids for E-SciencE, describing the scientific opportunities that such a Grid can provide, while illustrating the scale and complexity of the challenge involved in establishing a scientific infrastructure of this kind.

The GridPP Collaboration is building a UK computing Grid for particle physics, as part of the international effort towards computing for the Large Hadron Collider. The project, funded by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), began in September 2001 and completed its first phase 3 years later. GridPP is a collaboration of approximately 100 researchers in 19 UK university particle physics groups, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and CERN, reflecting the strategic importance of the project. In collaboration with other European and US efforts, the first phase of the project demonstrated the feasibility of developing, deploying and operating a Grid-based computing system to meet the UK needs of the Large Hadron Collider experiments. This note describes the work undertaken to achieve this goal. S Supplementary documentation is available from stacks.iop.org/JPhysG/32/N1. References to sections S1, S2.1, etc are to sections within this online supplement.

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Abstract. Several Grid projects have been established that deploy a "first generation Grid". In order to categorise existing projects in Europe, we have developed a taxonomy and applied it to 20 European Grid projects funded by the European Commission through the Framework 5 IST programme. We briefly describe the projects and thus provide an overview of current Grid activities in Europe. Next, we suggest future trends based on both the European Grid activities as well as progress of the world-wide Grid community. The work we present here is a source of information that aims to help to promote European Grid development.

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There is a long history of numerical modelling of various natural phenomena for purposes such as weather prediction or analysis of different earthquake-scenarios. In this paper we present the next logical step: combining multiple models together in a dynamically extensible framework in order to gain a better understanding of the nature and impact of inherently interlinked and dependent environmental phenomena. We call this approach Environmental Computing, which encompasses both the link to a broad range of environmental issues that can be approached using the framework model, and the notion that the component models and their features can be evaluated algorithmically to evaluate the accuracy and applicability of the results in different situations. Reaching this goal requires new technologies, commonly accepted approaches, standards and policies. This multi-pronged approach is necessary, since the combination of different models will bring forth challenges related to the compatibility of the execution environments as well as issues with the syntax and semantics of data. The data challenge applies both to the input of the while model ensemble as well as mechanisms of inter-model data exchange. To showcase the progress made towards this goal so far, we will present the technical and operational frameworks for the environmental multi-modelling, as well as specific case studies that have acted as proofs-of-concepts or pilot tests establishing the state of the art in this domain. These case studies, together with a short summary of related work, will lay the foundations for a discussion on the methods that could be used to assess the impact and benefits of Environmental Computing in this and other contexts.

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