Book excerpt: Welcome to GRID 2000, the first annual IEEE/ACM international workshop on grid computing sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society’s Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The workshop has received generous sponsorship from the European Grid Forum (eGrid), the EuroTools SIG on Metacomputing, Microsoft Research (USA), Sun Microsystems (USA), and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (India). It is a sign of the current high levels of interest and activity in Grid computing that we have had contributions to the workshop from researchers and developers in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and USA. It is our pleasure and honor to present the first annual international Grid computing meeting program and the proceedings. The Grid: A New Network Computing Infrastructure The growing popularity of the Internet along with the availability of powerful computers and high speed networks as low cost commodity components are helping to change the way we do computing. These new technologies are enabling the coupling of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, such as parallel supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and special devices, that can then be used as a unified resource and thus form what is popularly known as the “Grids”.