An enhanced dynamic replica creation and eviction mechanism in data grid federation environment

Data Grid Federation system is an infrastructure that connects several grid systems, which facilitates sharing of large amount of data, as well as storage and computing resources. The existing mechanisms on data replication focus on finding file values based on the number of files access in deciding which file to replicate, and place new replicas on locations that provide minimum read cost. DRCEM finds file values based on logical dependencies in deciding which file to replicate, and allocates new replicas on locations that provide minimum replica placement cost. This thesis presents an enhanced data replication strategy known as Dynamic Replica Creation and Eviction Mechanism (DRCEM) that utilizes the usage of data grid resources, by allocating appropriate replica sites around the federation. The proposed mechanism uses three schemes: 1) Dynamic Replica Evaluation and Creation Scheme, 2) Replica Placement Scheme, and 3) Dynamic Replica Eviction Scheme. DRCEM was evaluated using OptorSim network simulator based on four performance metrics: 1) Jobs Completion Times, 2) Effective Network Usage, 3) Storage Element Usage, and 4) Computing Element Usage. DRCEM outperforms ELALW and DRCM mechanisms by 30% and 26%, in terms of Jobs Completion Times. In addition, DRCEM consumes less storage compared to ELALW and DRCM by 42% and 40%. However, DRCEM shows lower performance compared to existing mechanisms regarding Computing Element Usage, due to additional computations of files logical dependencies. Results revealed better jobs completion times with lower resource consumption than existing approaches. This research produces three replication schemes embodied in one mechanism that enhances the performance of Data Grid Federation environment. This has contributed to the enhancement of the existing mechanism, which is capable of deciding to either create or evict more than one file during a particular time. Furthermore, files logical dependencies were integrated into the replica creation scheme to evaluate data files more accurately

Grid Federation: Number of Jobs and File Size Effects on Jobs Time

Grid federation is fast emerging as an alternative solution to the problems posed by the large data handling and computational needs of the existing numerous worldwide scientific projects. Efficient access to such extensively distributed data sets has become a fundamental challenge in grid computing. Creating and placing replicas to suitable sites, using data replication mechanisms can increase the system’s performance. Data Replication reduces data access time, ensures load balancing as well as narrows bandwidth consumption. In this paper, an enhanced data replication mechanism called EDR is proposed. EDR applies the principle of exponential growth/decay to both file size and file access history, based on the Latest Access Largest Weight (LALW) mechanism. The mechanism selects a popular file and determines an appropriate number of replicas as well as suitable grid sites for replication. It establishes the popularity of each file by associating a different weight to each historical data access record. Typically, recent data access record has a larger weight, which signifies that the record is more relevant to the current situation of data access. By varying the number of jobs as well as file sizes, the proposed EDR mechanism was simulated using file size and job completion time as the variable metrics. Optorsim simulator was used to evaluate the proposed mechanism alongside the existing Least Recently Used (LRU), and Least Frequently Used (LFU) Mechanisms. The simulation results showed that job completion time increases by the growth in both file size and number of jobs. EDR shows improved performance on the mean job completion time, compared to LRU and LFU mechanisms

A Dynamic Replica Creation and Eviction Mechanism based on Files Dependencies in a Federated Grid Environment

For quite a while, data replication has attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of data grid system, with a few researchers focusing on data replication in a federated data grid environment.The central goal of data replication mechanisms is to improve data locality, by creating more copies of the most popular files, and evicting unpopular files. In the conventional data grid systems, a common practice was to evaluate popular files based on economic approach, which evicts unpopular files based on least frequently or least recently used factor, to create space for incoming file replicas. However, this method tends to ignore the possible logical dependencies among st the replica files, which leads to the inappropriate evaluation of popular /unpopular files and consequently may result to the eviction of files with high logical dependencies on other files that may be needed later by other files or applications. As a resolution to this problem, a dynamic replica creation and eviction mechanism (DRCEM) is proposed by this research work, which considers files logical dependencies, while evaluating popular or unpopular files and before evicting files from the syste