What is the difference between E-Science Infrastructures and Distributed Computing Infrastructures

What is the difference between eScience infrastructures and grid computing or distributed computing infrastructures? And what are some of their examples.

Open Grid Engine or Akka/Something more fault tolerant?

My use case is that I have a pipeline of independent, stand alone programs, that I want to execute in a certain order on specific pieces of data that are output from previous pipeline stages.

Cache aware job placement algorithm

I am looking for an advise on selecting or building a job placement algorithm.