Selected papers from the 2010 e-Science All Hands Meeting.

The annual e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) is the premier e-Science conference held regularly in the United Kingdom, and provides a forum for the e-Science community to present and demonstrate their research, exchange ideas and socialize. This Theme Issue, entitled 'e-Science: novel research, new science, and enduring impact', features selected papers from AHM 2010 with the aim of highlighting some of the most innovative and interesting research of the e-Science community. The AHM typically attracts approximately a few hundred participants from academia, industry and commerce, with a technical programme of keynote presentations, regular sessions, workshops, poster sessions and birds-of-a-feather meetings. As the AHMs have developed, they have adopted a broad interpretation of what is meant by e-Science, and that is reflected in the papers selected for this issue.Science methodologies have become embedded in the research of leading academic institutions across the world, and are having an increasing impact on commerce and industry. This was reflected in the programme of AHM 2010, which featured invited talks by leading proponents of e-Science, a main presentation track and a variety of workshops, as well as posters and birds-of-a-feather sessions. The papers selected for this Theme Issue cover a spectrum of e-Science challenges and issues. Many of the papers deal with aspects of data-intensive research, as epitomized by the Fourth Paradigm vision expounded by Jim Gray and described in more detail in a recent book by Hey et al. [1]. The software needed to enable the Fourth Paradigm of data-intensive scientific discovery include data-management tools for planning, scheduling and monitoring data in large-scale distributed e-Science applications. These issues are investigated in the paper on the Stork data scheduler by Kosar et al. [2]. The paper by Liew et al. [3] looks at another aspect of the optimal use of distributed resources, One contribution of 12 to a Theme Issue 'e-Science: novel research, new science and enduring impact'.