Special section:: Data analysis, access and management on grids

Models, architectures and systems for grid environments that are intended to solve the problems in accessing, analyzing and managing data, are presented. H. Lamehamedi and B.Szymanski present a distributed, adaptive, and scalable middleware that provides transparent access to data in data grids. This approach has been inspired by the P2P techniques that require no centralized management, relying on dynamic techniques that adapt replica creation to continuously changing network connectivity and users behavior. F. García, J. Carretero et al. describe a new parallel file system for grids following the Global Grid Forum recommendations GridFTP and Resource Namespace Services (RNS). This system is based on the Expand Parallel File system, which combines several GridFTP servers to provide a generic distributed partition. L.Joitaa, OF. Rana, et al. also describe a Grid market for exchanging data mining services on the Catallactic market mechanism proposed by von Hayek.