Clouds for Science Tackle Challenges Facing Industry and Society

Since around 1950, scientific challenges have been an important application domain for computing and thus a significant factor driving developments in hardware and software. Almost 20 years ago, this led to the idea of grid computing, a key progenitor of today's cloud computing. Grid initiatives primarily focused on linking up supercomputing resources in North America and the Far East; in Europe, the focus was more on sharing distributed computing and information resources.