Towards a Transparent Data Access Model for the GridRPC Paradigm

As grids become more and more attractive for solving complex problems with high computational and storage requirements, the need for adequate grid programming models is considerable. To this purpose, the GridRPC model has been proposed as a grid version of the classical RPC paradigm, with the goal to build NES (Network-Enabled Server) environments. Paradoxically enough, in this model, data management has not been defined and is now explicitly left at the user's charge. The contribution of this paper is to enhance data management in NES by introducing a transparent data access model, available through the concept of grid data-sharing service. Data management (persistent storage, transfer, consistent replication) is totally delegated to the service, whereas the applications simply access shared data via global identifiers. We illustrate our approach using the DIET GridRPC middleware and the JUXMEM data-sharing service. Experiments performed on the Grid'5000 testbed demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach