A global and parallel file system for grids

Data management is one of the most important problems in grid environments. Most of the efforts in data management in grids have been focused on data replication. Data replication is a practical and effective method to achieve efficient data access in grids. However all data replication schemes lack in providing a grid file system. One important challenge facing grid computing is the design of a grid file system. The Global Grid Forum defines a Grid File System as a human-readable resource namespace for management of heterogeneous distributed data resources, that can span across multiple autonomous administrative domains. This paper describes a new Grid File System according to the Global Grid Forum recommendations that integrates heterogeneous data storage resources in grids using standard grid technologies: GridFTP and the Resource Namespace Services, both defined by the Global Grid Forum. To obtain high performance, we apply the parallel I/O techniques used in traditional parallel file systems. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.