Toward Replication in Grids for Digital Libraries with Freshness and Correctness Guarantees?

Abstract. Building Digital Libraries (DL) on top of data Grids while facilitating data access and minimizing access overheads is challenging. To achieve this, replication in a Grid has to provide dedicated features which are only partly supported by existing Grid environments. First, it must provide transparent and consistent access to distributed data. Second, it must dynamically control the creation and maintenance of replicas. Third, it should allow higher replication granularities, i.e., beyond individual files. Fourth, users should be able to specify their freshness demands. Finally, all these tasks must be performed efficiently. This paper presents an on-going work with the ultimate goal of building a fully integrated and self-managing replication subsystem for data Grids which will provide all above features. Our approach is to start with an accepted replication protocol for database clusters and to adapt it to the Grid.