[A presentation I highly recommend is one given by Ian Foster at a recent D-Grid meeting. There are many important concepts included in that presentation that are well worth investigating further. These new concepts are often referred to Web 2.0, others call it the participatory web, and still others call it user controlled processes - but essentially it is a new of thinking about doing science and business processes. The first generation of grids and eScience involved a strong coupling between the application and the underlying computational infrastructure. The second generation, built around Web 2.0 and SOA will empower many more users to deploy service oriented science where people create services independent of any specific computational infrastructure which anyone can discover. Other third party users can then compose these services with workflow tools to create a new function which then can be published as a new service to the global community. Users can now decouple their applications from the computational infrastructure and select best of breed facilities anywhere in the world - including commercial services such as Amazon Ec2 --BSA]
http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/Talks/Scaling%20eScience%20IBERGrid.pdf
Also highly recommended is Ian Foster's log at http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/