A Parallel I/O Middleware to Integrate Heterogeneous Storage Resources on Grids

Abstract

The philosophy behind grid is to use idle resources to achieve a higher level of computational services (computation, storage, etc). Existing data grids solutions are based in new servers, specific APIs and protocols, however this approach is not a realistic solution for enterprises and universities, because this supposes the deployment of new data servers across the company. This paper describes a new approach to data access in computational grids. This approach is called GridExpand, a parallel I/O middleware that integrates heterogeneous data storage resources in grids. The proposed grid solution integrates available data network solutions (NFS, CIFS, WebDAV) and makes possible the access to a global grid file system. Our solution differs from others because it does not need the installation of new data servers with new protocols. Most of the data grid solutions use replication as the way to obtain high performance. Replication, however, introduce consistency problem for many collaborative applications, and sometimes requires the usage of lots of resources. To obtain high performance, we apply the parallel I/O techniques used in parallel file systems.