Advances in networking and distributed computing allowed the establishment of
production Grid infrastructures during the past few years. Today, large-scale production
Grid infrastructures such as EGEE in Europe, OSG in the US, and NAREGI in Japan are
offering their services to many scientific and industrial applications, from domains as
diverse as Astronomy, Biomedicine, Computational Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Financial
Simulations, and High Energy Physics.
Grid infrastructures provide these applications a new means for collaborative research by
facilitating the sharing of computational and data resources at an unprecedented scale.
The efficient and secure sharing of data resources, which can reach several Tera- to
Petabytes in some application domains, is one of the main challenges for Grid
infrastructures.
In this talk we discuss the main challenges for data sharing on Grid infrastructures,
present several techniques that are already established on production Grid infrastructures
or currently being developed and point out main open research issues. We will also
present examples of application usage of one of the larges Grid infrastructures, EGEE.