Towards the next-generation Grid: a pervasive environment for knowledge-based computing

The Grid is an integrated infrastructure for coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in distributed environments. A main factor that will drive the development and evolution of the Grid will be the necessity to face the enormous amount of data that any field of human activity is producing at a rate never seen before. This position paper attempts to forecast the ongoing evolution of computational Grids towards what we name next-generation Grids. We describe where we are now and where, most probably, we will go in the next years, and propose a general architecture for the emerging next-generation Grid.