Grids: The top ten questions

The design and implementation of a national computing systems Grid has become a reachable goal for both computer and computational scientists. A distributed infrastructure capable of sophisticated computational functions can bring many benefits to scientific work, but poses many challenges to computer scientists, both technical and socio-political. Technical challenges include having basic software tools, functioning and pervasive security, and administration, while socio-political issues include building a user community, adding incentives for sites to be part of a user-centric environment, and educating funding sources about the needs of this community. This paper details the areas relating to Grid research that we feel still need to be addressed to fully leverage the advantages of the Grid.