"To our knowledge, most of the data-intensive applications that run on the Grid today focus on moving hundreds of thousands of files from the storage archives to the thousands of computing nodes." [1]
The above quote is from [1] which is written by the team that has given us the SkyServer. Talking to Maria recently I was really surprised to find out that because they are not using the protocols that GGF is standardising (WS-RF, DAIS, etc.), some Grid folks do not consider their work as related/relevant (and hence they have difficulties getting their papers accepted). If such systems are not typical of the large-scale, scientific applications that the Grid is all about, I don't know what is.
[1] Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban, Jim Gray, Alexander S. Szalay, James Annis, Aniruddha R. Thakar, and William J. O'Mullane, "When Database Systems Meet the Grid", 2nd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, January 4-7, Asilonmar, CA, US, 2005