Special section: Federated resource management in grid and cloud computing systems

Welcome to the special issue of Future Generation Computer System (FGCS) journal. This special issue compiles a number of excellent technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art in federated management [1–3] of Grid and Cloud computing environments. Federated management of administratively distributed grids and clouds offers significant benefits including: (i) improving the ability of resource providers tomeet SLA compliance [4] for clients and offer improved service by optimizing the service placement and throughput according to users’ QoS needs; (ii) enhancing the peak-load handling and dynamic system expansion capacity of every Grid/Cloud domain through federation [5] without the need for setting up a new software or hardware infrastructure in every location, and (iii) adapting to failures including natural disasters and regular system maintenance more gracefully as providers can transparently migrate their services to other domains in the federation, thus avoiding SLA violations and resulting penalties. Hence, federated management not only ensures business continuity but also augments the reliability of the participating resource providers. Next, we briefly describe the technical contributions, whichwere selected for publication in this special issue. All of the selected papers underwent a rigorous peerreview process. A major performance issue in large-scale decentralized distributed systems, such as grids, is how to ensure that jobs finish their executionwithin estimated completion times in the presence of resource performance fluctuations. Previously, several techniques including advance reservation, rescheduling and migration have been adopted to resolve/relieve this issue; however, there are some non-trivial practical hurdles that need to be addressed. The use of leveraging additional resources from clouds may be an attractive alternative, since resources in clouds are much more reliable than those in grids. In the paper ‘‘Rescheduling for Reliable Job Completion with the Support of Clouds’’, Young Choon Lee and