A Fault-Tolerant Transparent Data Sharing Service for the Grid

We consider a transparent data sharing service for distributed applications in the Grid. Our service may alleviate the burden of the user and the programmer to manage the distribution and the migration of data by transparently locating, caching, and managing the consistency of the data. To fit in a large scale and dynamic environment such as the Grid, our data sharing service tolerates every reconfiguration (benign failures, arrivals and departures of sites) in the system's life time, provided that no more than a fixed number of reconfigurations occur simultaneously. This service relies on application backward error recovery and replication to ensure the liveness of the application. Reconfiguration has a high impact on data location mechanisms. To solve this issue, our service uses a distributed hash table provided by a structured overlay network. We have experimentally evaluated our service and present in this paper an analysis of the results