Data Management over the GRID: Heaven or Hell?

The last decade has seen unprecedented advances in network and distributed-system technologies, which have opened up the way for the construction of global-scale systems based on completely new conceptions of computation and sharing of resources. The dream of integrating unlimited levels of processing power, unlimited amounts of information, and an unlimited variety of services, and offering the entire package in a reliable and seamless fashion to widely distributed users is quickly becoming reality. Scientific applications will be among the first to take advantage of such environments, as the demands of current and future experimental studies for intensive computation and processing of very large amounts of information are pressing.