CROWN: A service grid middleware for e-science

In the year 2004, with the development of grid technologies in both academia and industry, the Natural Science Foundation Committee of China (NSFC), which is one of the main funding parties in China, announced its e-Science Program named Network-based e-Science Environment. As one of the gridrelated research programs, this program is also referred to as the NSFCGrid. The program started in 2004 and was completed at the end of 2007. The main goal of this program is to build up a virtual scientific and experimental environment to enable wide-area research such as large-scale computing and distributed data processing. The research projects are organized into three layers: basic theory and principles, general testbed, and pilot applications. In contrast to CNGrid and ChinaGrid, NSFGrid pays more attention to the fundamental research of grid-related technologies.