GLAS-PPE/2003-09

Evaluation of an Economy-Based File Replication Strategy for a Data Grid

William H. Bell (1), David G. Cameron (1), Ruben Carvajal-Schiaffino (2),
A. Paul Millar (1), Kurt Stockinger (3), Floriano Zini (2)

(1) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland
(2) ITC-irst, Via Sommarive 18, 38050 Povo (Trento), Italy
(3) CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland

International Workshop on Agent based Cluster and Grid Computing
at International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2003).
Tokyo, Japan

Optimising the use of Grid resources is critical for users to effectively exploit a Data Grid. Data replication is considered a major technique for reducing data access cost to Grid jobs. This paper evaluates a novel replication strategy, based on an economic model, that optimises both the selection of replicas for running jobs and the dynamic creation of replicas in Grid sites. In our model, optimisation agents are located on Grid sites and use an auction protocol for selecting the optimal replica of a data file and a prediction function to make informed decisions about local data replication. We evaluate our replication strategy with OptorSim, a Data Grid simulator developed by the authors. The results show that our proposed strategy can result in a marked improvement over traditional replication strategies in a Grid environment.


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