Section: Scientific Foundations

Transparent, distributed data sharing

The management of massive data blocks naturally requires the use of data fragmentation and of distributed storage. Grid infrastructures, typically built by aggregating distributed resources that may belong to different administration domains, were built during the last years with the goal of providing an appropriate solution. When considering the existing approaches to grid data management, we can notice that most of them heavily rely on explicit data localization and on explicit transfers of large amounts of data across the distributed architecture: GridFTP  [40] , LDR  [35] , Chirp  [29] , IBP  [41] , NeST  [42] , etc. Managing huge amounts of data in such an explicit way at a very large scale makes the design of grid applications much more complex. One key issue to be addressed is therefore the transparency with respect to data localization and data movements. Such a transparency is highly suitable, as it alleviates the user of the need to handle data localization and transfers.