A thorough overview of the next generation in computing, this concise guide explores state-of-the-art grid projects, core grid technologies, and applications of the grid. It covers virtual organizations, scheduling algorithms, fault tolerance strategies, grid workflow management systems, and security technologies. The authors present several grid middlewares adopted in scientific applications, explain the mechanisms behind well-known grid projects, and apply the Monte Carlo method and PDEs to industrial problems in finance and computational mechanics. They also describe the components and installation of Globus Toolkits 4.0 and gLite.