It is really a pleasure for me to write the foreword for this book, Fundamentals
of Grid Computing: Theory, Algorithms and Technologies.
Grid computing is now becoming a very powerful and innovative tool al￾lowing tens of thousands of researchers around the world to perform break￾throughs in their research projects. The most striking example can be seen
from the most ambitious research project in the world, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) giant accelerator at the European center for particle physics
(CERN) in Geneva, which is relying completely on grid technology to store,
process and analyze its huge volumes of distributed data. Just ten years ago,
the LHC computing model was still based on shipping cassettes from one cen￾ter to another through trucks and planes! This shows the fantastic progress
made by grid technology during that time scale, and the maturity reached
by these techniques is quite well-reflected in Fr´ed´eric Magoul`es’s book, which
describes in a very clear way the state of the art grid middleware.