A practical transparent data sharing service for the Grid

International audienceWe consider a transparent data sharing servicefor distributed applications in the Grid. Our service may alleviate the burden ofthe user and the programmer to manage the distribution and the migration ofdata by transparently locating, caching, and managing the consistency ofthe data. Tofit in a large scale and dynamic environment such as the Grid, our data sharing service tolerates any number ofreconfigurations (benign failures, arrivals and departures of sites) in the system's life time, and up to afixed number of simultaneous reconfigurations of the system. This service relies on application backward error recovery and replication to ensure the liveness ofthe application. Reconfiguration has a high impact on data location mechanisms. Our service leverages an underlying structured overlay network to solve this issue. We have experimentally evaluated our service andpresent in this paper an analysis ofthe results