This book presents research from many of the major projects involved in the emerging global grid infrastructure.  With a particular focus on the practical advantages and applications of grid computing – including real case studies – the book provides an in-depth study of grid technology for a wide range of different needs. Topics: examines a remote instrumentation infrastructure, and a methodology to support e-science applications on e-infrastructures; describes the GEMS storage system, and pipeline workflows for optimizing end-to-end performance in wide-area networks; investigates semantic grid system architecture, social grid agents, and monitoring platforms designed for large-scale distributed systems; explores job control using service-level agreements; introduces the Composable Services Architecture for dynamic service provisioning, and the semantically driven communication middleware platform, Phoenix; discusses the PhyloGrid application, and a numerical simulation performed using grid computing.