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Definition: Grid approachThe Grid approach promotes a vision for sophisticated international scientific and business-oriented collaborations.The term "Grid" is an analogy to the electric power grid that allows pervasive access to electric power. In a similar fashion, computational Grids provide access to pervasive collections of compute-related resources and services. As early as 1965 the designers of the Multics operating system envisioned and named requirements for a computer facility operating "like a power company or water company" [82], and others envisioned Grid-like scenarios [60]. However, we emphasize that our current understanding of the Grid approach goes far beyond simply sharing compute resources in a distributed fashion. Besides supercomputer and compute pools, Grids include access to information resources (such as large-scale databases) and access to knowledge resources (such as collaborative interactions between colleagues). Essential is that these resources may be at geographically disperse locations and may be controlled by different organizations. Thus, the following definition for a Grid is appropriate: Definition: GridAn infrastructure that allows for flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, resources, and organizations.So far we have used the term Grid rather abstract manner. To distinguish the concept of a Grid from an actual instantiation of a Grid as a real available infrastructure we use the term production Grid. Such production Grids are typically shared among a set of users. The analogy in the electrical power grid would be a power company or agglomerate of companies that maintain their own grid while providing persistent services to the user community. Thus, the following definition is introduced: Definition: Production GridAn instantiaion of a Grid that manifests itself by including a set of resources to be accessed by Grid users.Additionally, we expect that multiple production Grids will exist and be supported by multiple organizations. Fundamental to the Grid is the idea of sharing.

To me, this progress has been truly awesome. Larry Wos understands the events that led to this progress more thoroughly than anyone else I have met. He was there in 1963, working with J. A. Robinson and George Robinson at Argonne, when resolution was discovered. He has been part of many steps forward since then, and continues focusing on the issue of how to get programs to pluck proofs of theorems from huge spaces of logical formulas.Larry has played a unique role in the development of automated deduction systems. His ideas have repeatedly led to significant, and often fundamental, advances. A few of us have been fortunate enough to discuss these ideas with him frequently over the years, but most of the community is largely unfamiliar with Larry and his rather unorthodox approach to research. Certainly, his papers say a great deal and have reached a wide audience, but there is far more to what occurred than appears in those published papers. His earlier books were serious attempts to capture the essential positions and techniques (and to do so in a way that would entertain as well as educate). Yet there is much more to be said about the views, insights, and experiences that make up Larry's perspective on the field. Certainly this book is not comprehensive either; however, it does, as those before it have, uniquely capture aspects of Larry's views and the experiments that shaped them.Different classes of researchers will approach the material in this book from widely differing backgrounds, and what they wish to extract will also vary considerably. A few will approach it with the same motives I had in forming a relationship with Larry-a desire to understand how to build more powerful systems. Far more will wish to learn about how to use a program such as OTTER to attack problems in logic and mathematics. Others will simply be trying to formulate a reasonable overview of the field. In each case, I believe that there are critical lessons to be learned from both this book and the separate two-volume book of his collected papers. For me, one of those lessons is foremost: You must play with problems if you hope to get insight. People often believe that they can predict accurately what will be the outcome of an experiment in automated deduction, but my experience indicates that it is seldom the case. By providing a copy of OTTER-a wonderful tool developed by William McCune-Larry has given you the opportunity to easily encode and run problems that vary from extremely simple exercises to open questions in mathematics.I am tempted to try to summarize what I think is really important in Larry's work, but that would be foolish-you, the reader, should try to understand Larry's perspective, not my understanding of it. Instead, let me describe my first encounter with Larry's work: the paper in which he introduced paramodulation (Robinson and Wos 1969). I was a young graduate student attempting to define a thesis project. When I read the paper, I basically ignored Wos's opinions and focused on the problem he posed (a modestly di...

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