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Grid technologies enable large-scale sharing of resources within formal or informal consortia of individuals and/or institutions: what are sometimes called virtual organizations. In these settings, the discovery, characterization, and monitoring of resources, services, and computations are challenging problems due to the considerable diversity; large numbers, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested. Consequently, information services are a vital part of any Grid software infrastructure, providing fundamental mechanisms for discovery and monitoring, and hence for planning and adapting application behavior. We present an information services architecture that addresses performance, security, scalability, and robustness requirements. Our architecture defines simple low-level enquiry and registration protocols that make it easy to incorporate individual entities into various information structures, such as aggregate directories that support a variety of different query languages and discovery strategies. These protocols can also be combined with other Grid protocols to construct additional higher-level services and capabilities such as brokering, monitoring, fault detection, and troubleshooting. Our architecture has been implemented as MDS-2, which forms part of the Globus Grid toolkit and has been widely deployed and applied.