Since late 1990s, Grid computing has become an increasingly important research topic within computer science. Grid computing is concerned how to share and coordinated use diverse resources in distributed environments. The dynamic and multi-institutional nature of these environments introduces challenging security issues, which include integration with existing systems and technologies, interoperability with different "hosting environments" and trust relationships among interacting hosting environments. We need new technical approaches to handle those security issues. During those years, many prominent companies and research institutes have proposed and implemented several architectures for grid and grid security. In this survey, first, we introduce the Globus Toolkit, some commercial Grid productions and Grid Testbeds. Second we describe several Grid security architectures and research methods of security issues from research institutes and Universities. Next we discuss the application of grid computing to the Global Information Grid (GIG). Finally we give some potential research topics..
