The 2nd International Winter School in Grid Computing (IWSGC'09) will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students. It will be delivered fully online: participants will be able to attend the School without losing time and money on travelling. It will examine the conceptual and practical underpinnings of today's grids. Experts will provide exciting practical exercises, discuss the challenges of building and sustaining e-Infrastructure, report its rapid influence on the way we research, design and make decisions. They will share their vision of the developments and challenges ahead. Comparable in commitment and scope with the famous International Summer School in Grid Computing (ISSGC), the International Winter School in Grid Computing provides a unique online educational opportunity. Rigorous both in admission requirements and expected work commitment, IWSGC retains the majority of learner benefits from ISSGC while offering a high degree of flexibility. Re-used Summer School materials will tackle the principles, technologies, experiences and methods of using Grids. They will also review the research perspectives and report recent significant successes. Opportunities will be available for online practical exercises. The work will be both challenging and rewarding. Extensive Forum and Chat discussions as well as live events will support the curriculum and help students to form lasting friendships and enhance collaborative research. To support the hands-on laboratory sessions, the GILDA grid will host widely used middleware. This testbed will provide a rich environment for hands-on learning and experimentation. Exercises and team work will encourage students to learn by using this testbed. Students will be fired up with enthusiasm, equipped with practical skills and will leave the course with many shared experiences, new friends and a new capacity for research into and using advanced distributed computing systems. The target audience will include enthusiastic and ambitious young researchers who expect to use or develop grids in their research. We look forward to greeting participants from virtually every continent, from any country. Applications are invited from researchers who have recently started (or are about to start) working on Grid projects. Students may be planning to pioneer or enable new forms of e-Infrastructure, engage in fundamental distributed systems research or to develop new methods in any discipline that depends on the emerging capabilities of e-Infrastructure. Applications In all previous incarnations of the Summer School, and last year's Winter School, the level of applications has been of an extremely high standard and we have received more applications than places available. Selection for the Winter School is therefore competitive based on the information supplied on the application form and by an applicant's referee. We expect to accept between 25 and 30 students. We will be looking for students with commitment and enthusiasm for Grid research and development. We will expect competence and experience in some aspects of software development, distributed systems, computational systems, data systems and Grid applications. Most students will establish their credentials from academic qualifications, but some will base this on experience. We also welcome as participants educators who are planning to teach Grid computing. The Winter School will be conducted in English, so participants are expected to be comfortable using spoken and written English. We expect participants from computer science, computational science and any application discipline. The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and will build on that diversity. 24th November 2008: Applications open 12th January 2009: Applications closed School Website: www.iceage-eu.org/iwsgc09/ E-mail: IWSGC@lists.nesc.ac.uk