Data management in an international data grid project

Abstract

In this paper we report on preliminary work and architectural design carried out in the "Data Management" work package in the International Data Grid project. Our aim within a time scale of three years is to provide Grid middleware services supporting the I/O- intensive world-wide distributed next generation experiments in High- Energy Physics, Earth Observation and Bioinformatics. The goal is to specify, develop, integrate and test tools and middleware infrastructure to coherently manage and share Petabyte-range information volumes in high-throughput production-quality Grid environments. The middleware will allow secure access to massive amounts of data in a universal name- space, to move and replicate data at high speed from one geographical site to another, and to manage synchronisation of remote copies. We put much attention on clearly specifying and categorising existing work on the Grid, especially in data management in Grid related projects. Challenging use cases are described and how they map to architectural decisions concerning data access, replication, meta data management, security and query optimisation.