A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

An Arbitrary 2D Structured Replica Control Protocol

Traditional replication protocols that logically arrange the replicas into a specific structure have reasonable availability, lower communication cost as well as system load than those that do not require any logical organisation of replicas. We propose in this paper the A2DS protocol: a single protocol that, unlike the existing proposed protocols, can be adapted to any 2D structure. Its read operation is carried out on any replica of every level of the structure whereas write operations are performed on all replicas of a single level of the structure. We present several basic 2D structures and introduce the new idea of obtaining other 2D structures by the composition of several basic ones. Two structures are proposed that have near optimal performance in terms of the communication cost, availability and system load of their read and write operations. Also, we introduce a new protocol that provides better performance for its write operations than those of ROWA protocol while preserving similar read performance

DottedDB: anti-entropy without merkle trees, deletes without tombstones

To achieve high availability in the face of network partitions, many distributed databases adopt eventual consistency, allow temporary conflicts due to concurrent writes, and use some form of per-key logical clock to detect and resolve such conflicts. Furthermore, nodes synchronize periodically to ensure replica convergence in a process called anti-entropy, normally using Merkle Trees. We present the design of DottedDB, a Dynamo-like key-value store, which uses a novel node-wide logical clock framework, overcoming three fundamental limitations of the state of the art: (1) minimize the metadata per key necessary to track causality, avoiding its growth even in the face of node churn; (2) correctly and durably delete keys, with no need for tombstones; (3) offer a lightweight anti-entropy mechanism to converge replicated data, avoiding the need for Merkle Trees. We evaluate DottedDB against MerkleDB, an otherwise identical database, but using per-key logical clocks and Merkle Trees for anti-entropy, to precisely measure the impact of the novel approach. Results show that: causality metadata per object always converges rapidly to only one id-counter pair; distributed deletes are correctly achieved without global coordination and with constant metadata; divergent nodes are synchronized faster, with less memory-footprint and with less communication overhead than using Merkle Trees.This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project «POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961», and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia as part of project «UID/EEA/50014/2013».info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Application Layer Multicasting Overlay Protocol a NARADA Protocol

The conventional wisdom has been that Network Layer Internet protocol(IP) is the natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related functionality but it is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scalability, network management, deployment and support for higher layer functionality such as error, flow and congestion control. In this context, an alternative architecture is, Application layer multicast (End Systems Multicasting), where at Application layer, implements all multicast related functionality including membership management and packet replication. This shifting of multicast support from routers to end systems has the potential to address the most problems associated with IP multicast. In Application-layer multicast, applications arrange themselves as a logical overlay network and transfer data within the overlay network (between end hosts). In this context, we study these performance concerns in the context of the NARADA protocol (an application layer multicasting protocol). In Narada, end systems self-organize into an overlay structure using a fully distributed protocol. We present details of NARADA and evaluate it using NS-2 simulations. Our results indicate that the performance penalties are low both from the application and the network perspectives. We believe the potential benefits of transferring multicast functionality from routers to end systems, significantly outweigh the performance penalty incurred

Implementing PRISMA/DB in an OOPL

PRISMA/DB is implemented in a parallel object-oriented language to gain insight in the usage of parallelism. This environment allows us to experiment with parallelism by simply changing the allocation of objects to the processors of the PRISMA machine. These objects are obtained by a strictly modular design of PRISMA/DB. Communication between the objects is required to cooperatively handle the various tasks, but it limits the potential for parallelism. From this approach, we hope to gain a better understanding of parallelism, which can be used to enhance the performance of PRISMA/DB.\ud The work reported in this document was conducted as part of the PRISMA project, a joint effort with Philips Research Eindhoven, partially supported by the Dutch "Stimuleringsprojectteam Informaticaonderzoek (SPIN)

Partial replication in distributed software transactional memory

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaDistributed software transactional memory (DSTM) is emerging as an interesting alternative for distributed concurrency control. Usually, DSTM systems resort to data distribution and full replication techniques in order to provide scalability and fault tolerance. Nevertheless, distribution does not provide support for fault tolerance and full replication limits the system’s total storage capacity. In this context, partial data replication rises as an intermediate solution that combines the best of the previous two trying to mitigate their disadvantages. This strategy has been explored by the distributed databases research field, but has been little addressed in the context of transactional memory and, to the best of our knowledge, it has never before been incorporated into a DSTM system for a general-purpose programming language. Thus, we defend the claim that it is possible to combine both full and partial data replication in such systems. Accordingly, we developed a prototype of a DSTM system combining full and partial data replication for Java programs. We built from an existent DSTM framework and extended it with support for partial data replication. With the proposed framework, we implemented a partially replicated DSTM. We evaluated the proposed system using known benchmarks, and the evaluation showcases the existence of scenarios where partial data replication can be advantageous, e.g., in scenarios with small amounts of transactions modifying fully replicated data. The results of this thesis show that we were able to sustain our claim by implementing a prototype that effectively combines full and partial data replication in a DSTM system. The modularity of the presented framework allows the easy implementation of its various components, and it provides a non-intrusive interface to applications.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - (FCT/MCTES) in the scope of the research project PTDC/EIA-EIA/113613/2009 (Synergy-VM