A GA-Based Replica Placement Mechanism for Data Grid

Data Grid is an infrastructure that manages huge amount of data files, and provides intensive computational resources across geographically distributed collaboration. To increase resource availability and to ease resource sharing in such environment, there is a need for replication services. Data replication is one of the methods used to improve the performance of data access in distributed systems by replicating multiple copies of data files in the distributed sites. Replica placement mechanism is the process of identifying where to place copies of replicated data files in a Grid system. Choosing the best location is not an easy task. Current works find the best location based on number of requests and read cost of a certain file. As a result, a large bandwidth is consumed and increases the computational time. Authors proposed a GA-Based Replica Placement Mechanism (DBRPM) that finds the best locations to store replicas based on five criteria, namely, 1) Read Cost, 2) Storage Cost, 3) Sites' Workload, and 4) Replication Site.