Replica placement in data grid: considering utility and risk

Grid computing emerges from the need to integrate a collection of distributed computing resources to offer performance unattainable by any single machine. Grid technology facilitates data sharing across many organizations in different geographical locations. Data replication is an excellent technique to move and cache data close to users. Replication reduces access latency and bandwidth consumption. It also facilitates load balancing and improves reliability by creating multiple data copies. However, grid environments introduce significant new challenges such as dynamic resource availability and network performance changes. As users requests vary constantly, the system needs a dynamic replication strategy that adapts to users' dynamic behavior. To address such issues, this paper presents and evaluates the performance of six dynamic replication strategies for two different kinds of access patterns. Our replication strategies are mainly based on utility and risk. Before placing a replica at a site, we calculate an expected utility and risk index for each site by considering current network load and user requests. A replication site is then chosen by optimizing expected utility or risk indexes.