Book excerpt: Grid technology offers the potential for providing secure access to remote services, thereby promoting scientific collaborations in an unprecedented scale. Grid Resource Management: Toward Virtual and Services Compliant Grid Computing presents a comprehensive account of the architectural issues of grid technology, such as security, data management, logging, and aggregation of services, as well as related technologies. After covering grid usages, grid systems, and the evolution of grid computing, the book discusses operational issues associated with web services and service-oriented architecture. It also explores technical and business topics relevant to data management, the development and characteristics of P2P systems, and a grid-enabled virtual file system (GRAVY) that integrates underlying heterogeneous file systems into a unified location-transparent file system of the grid. The book covers scheduling algorithms, strategies, problems, and architectures as well as workflow management systems and semantic technologies. In addition, the authors describe how to deploy scientific applications into a grid environment. They also explain grid engineering and grid service programming. Examining both data and execution management in grid computing, this book chronicles the current trend of grid developments toward a more service-oriented approach that exposes grid protocols using web services standards.