Special section: Selected papers from the 7th IEEE/ACM international conference on grid computing (Grid2006)

The highlights of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing held in Barcelona on September 28-29, 2006 were presented. The program for this conference covered all areas of Grid computing research, which include Internet-based computing models, applications, including eScience and eBusiness applications, middleware and toolkits, and virtual Instrumentation. One of the paper presented an approach to Grid scheduling that focused in the global cost optimization problem rather than in the details of individual applications taking into account the entire workload and dynamically adjusting to the varying service demands. Another contribution presented the design of a desktop grid implemented over a modified Peer-to-Peer architecture. Another paper summarized ongoing research and recent results on the development of flexible access control infrastructure for complex resource provisioning in Grid-based collaborative applications and on-demand network services provisioning.