What is meant by e-Science? In the future, e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.
The World Wide Web gave us access to information on Web pages written in html anywhere on the Internet. A much more powerful infrastructure is needed to support e-Science. Besides information stored in Web pages, scientists will need easy access to expensive remote facilities, to computing resources - either as dedicated Teraflop computers or cheap collections of PCs - and to information stored in dedicated databases.
The Grid is an architecture proposed to bring all these issues together
and make a reality of such a vision for e-Science. Ian Foster and Carl
Kesselman, inventors of the Globus approach to the Grid define the Grid
as an enabler for Virtual Organisations: "An infrastructure that enables
flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections
of individuals, institutions and resources." It is important to recognize
that resource in this context includes computational systems and data
storage and specialized experimental facilities.
Taken from the Research
Council e-Science Core Programme
"e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science,
and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it."
"e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken."
John Taylor
Director General of Research Councils
Office of Science and Technology