Special Issue: Selected Papers from the 2004 U.K. e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2004)

The annual U.K. e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) is the premier e-Science conference held regularly in the United Kingdom. Supported mainly by the U.K. e-Science Core Programme, with sponsorship from the Joint Information Systems Committee and from industry, the AHM provides a forum for the e-Science community to present and demonstrate their research, exchange ideas and socialize. The AHM typically attracts approximately 600 participants from academia, industry and commerce, with a technical programme of keynote presentations, regular sessions, workshops, poster sessions and birds-of-a-feather meetings. The term ‘e-Science’ was first coined by Sir John Taylor, then Director General of the Research Councils, who said that ‘e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it’. Such collaboration often takes place through the secure sharing of resources distributed across multiple partners, which has led Foster and Kesselmann to formulate the concept of the Virtual Organization. The Grid is a closely-related concept that refers to the distributed hardware, software and data that are often used to support collaboration. 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 special issue.