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

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science

Replica maintenance strategy for data grid

Data Grid is an infrastructure that manages huge amount of data files, and provides intensive computational resources across geographically distributed collaboration.Increasing the performance of such system can be achieved by improving the overall resource usage, which includes network and storage resources.Improving network resource usage is achieved by good utilization of network bandwidth that is considered as an important factor affecting job execution time.Meanwhile, improving storage resource usage is achieved by good utilization of storage space usage. 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.Having distributed the replicas to various locations, they need to be monitored.As a result of dynamic changes in the data grid environment, some of the replicas need to be relocated.In this paper we proposed a maintenance replica placement strategy termed as Unwanted Replica Deletion Strategy (URDS) as a part of Replica maintenance service.The main purpose of the proposed strategy is to find the placement of unwanted replicas to be deleted.OptorSim is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy. The simulation results show that URDS requires less execution time and consumes less network usage and has a best utilization of storage space usage compared to existing approaches

A fundamental theorem of asset pricing for continuous time large financial markets in a two filtration setting

We present a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing (FTAP) for continuous time large financial markets with two filtrations in an $L^p$-setting for $1 \leq p < \infty$. This extends the results of Yuri Kabanov and Christophe Stricker \cite{KS:06} to continuous time and to a large financial market setting, however, still preserving the simplicity of the discrete time setting. On the other hand it generalizes Stricker's $L^p$-version of FTAP \cite{S:90} towards a setting with two filtrations. We do neither assume that price processes are semi-martigales, (and it does not follow due to trading with respect to the \emph{smaller} filtration) nor that price processes have any path properties, neither any other particular property of the two filtrations in question, nor admissibility of portfolio wealth processes, but we rather go for a completely general (and realistic) result, where trading strategies are just predictable with respect to a smaller filtration than the one generated by the price processes. Applications range from modeling trading with delayed information, trading on different time grids, dealing with inaccurate price information, and randomization approaches to uncertainty

Replica Creation Algorithm for Data Grids

Data grid system is a data management infrastructure that facilitates reliable access and sharing of large amount of data, storage resources, and data transfer services that can be scaled across distributed locations. This thesis presents a new replication algorithm that improves data access performance in data grids by distributing relevant data copies around the grid. The new Data Replica Creation Algorithm (DRCM) improves performance of data grid systems by reducing job execution time and making the best use of data grid resources (network bandwidth and storage space). Current algorithms focus on number of accesses in deciding which file to replicate and where to place them, which ignores resources’ capabilities. DRCM differs by considering both user and resource perspectives; strategically placing replicas at locations that provide the lowest transfer cost. The proposed algorithm uses three strategies: Replica Creation and Deletion Strategy (RCDS), Replica Placement Strategy (RPS), and Replica Replacement Strategy (RRS). DRCM was evaluated using network simulation (OptorSim) based on selected performance metrics (mean job execution time, efficient network usage, average storage usage, and computing element usage), scenarios, and topologies. Results revealed better job execution time with lower resource consumption than existing approaches. This research contributes replication strategies embodied in one algorithm that enhances data grid performance, capable of making a decision on creating or deleting more than one file during same decision. Furthermore, dependency-level-between-files criterion was utilized and integrated with the exponential growth/decay model to give an accurate file evaluation

Business Grid Services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilize more specialized services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilized by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks

Cost and Performance-Based Resource Selection Scheme for Asynchronous Replicated System in Utility-Based Computing Environment

A resource selection problem for asynchronous replicated systems in utility-based computing environment is addressed in this paper. The needs for a special attention on this problem lies on the fact that most of the existing replication scheme in this computing system whether implicitly support synchronous replication and/or only consider read-only job. The problem is undoubtedly complex to be solved as two main issues need to be concerned simultaneously, i.e. 1) the difficulty on predicting the performance of the resources in terms of job response time, and 2) an efficient mechanism must be employed in order to measure the trade-off between the performance and the monetary cost incurred on resources so that minimum cost is preserved while providing low job response time. Therefore, a simple yet efficient algorithm that deals with the complexity of resource selection problem in utility-based computing systems is proposed in this paper. The problem is formulated as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. The advantages of the algorithm are two-folds. On one fold, it hides the complexity of resource selection process without neglecting important components that affect job response time. The difficulty on estimating job response time is captured by representing them in terms of different QoS criteria levels at each resource. On the other fold, this representation further relaxed the complexity in measuring the trade-offs between the performance and the monetary cost incurred on resources. The experiments proved that our proposed resource selection scheme achieves an appealing result with good system performance and low monetary cost as compared to existing algorithms