Grid research, rooted in distributed and high performance computing, started in midto- late 1990s when scientists around the world acknowledged the need to establish an infrastructure to support their collaborative research on compute and data intensive experiments. Soon afterwards, national and international research and development authorities realized the importance of the Grid and gave it a primary position on their research and development agenda. The importance of the Grid was translated into large funding from various national and international sources, channeled to various Grid projects around the world aiming at building the so-called global infrastructure for e-Science. Selected key projects, such as EGEE (Enabling Grids For E-sciencE) in Europe.
