Using clouds to address grid limitations

This article is a review of the importance of identifying the conceptual components participating in the design of Grid infrastructure, the interfaces presented to other elements and the semantics involved. We will show that the middleware layer still exposes too much detail of the underlying implementation, thus making the application development more complex, difficulting interoperability and scaling. We also discuss Cloud Computing, an emerging technology that has been so far successful in the IT market, also show how Grids and Clouds are related, and to what extent these technologies may provide features that will help accomplish the Grid vision for e-Science applications.