Resource Merging and Synchronization in FTPGrid*

FTPGrid incorporates traditional FTP system with grid technology to implement large-scale resource sharing with high performance and reliability. FTP servers that geographically neighbor with each other form communities, which in turn constitute the FTPGrid. In this paper, we propose a resource merging mechanism to establish a well-organized resource directory in each community by merging duplicated resources according to their message digest. Different resources with the same names would be treated separately while the same resources with different names would be merged. Moreover, we design a synchronization protocol that keeps the resource directory of each community synchronized to give a unified view to end users. Experiment shows that the resource merging mechanism and the synchronization protocol could make a group of FTP servers as a single one so that any user connecting to any one of them can retrieve all the resources expediently and efficiently