A practical 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 any number of reconfigurations (benign failures, arrivals and departures of sites) in the system's life time, and up to a fixed number of simultaneous reconfigurations of the system. 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. Our service leverages an underlying structured overlay network to solve this issue. We have experimentally evaluated our service and present in this paper an analysis of the results.