Advances in Grid and Pervasive Computing / Lecture Notes in Computer Science Bd.4459 (PDF)

A High-Performance Virtual Storage System for Taiwan UniGrid (p. 43)
1 Introduction

With the rapid growth of computing power and storage capacity of computers, many researchers and scientists have been concentrated on the development of various Grid systems to efficiently utilize distributed computing and storage resources in recent years.

In Taiwan, a community of educational and research organizations interested in Grid computing technologies founded a Grid computing platform, called Taiwan UniGrid [1]. These organizations contribute their resources of computer clusters for sharing and collaboration. The objective of Taiwan UniGrid is to provide educational and research organizations with a powerful computing platform where they can study Grid-related issues, practice parallel programming on Grid environments and execute computing/data-intensive applications.

As similar to other Grid systems, Taiwan UniGrid consists of three primary portions: Computational Grid, Data Grid and Web Portal. Computational Grid is responsible for managing scattered and heterogeneous computing resources and scheduling the jobs submitted by users. Data Grid is a virtual storage infrastructure that integrates distributed, independently managed data resources and allows users to save and retrieve their data without understanding the configuration of underlying storage resources.

Web Portal, developed by National Tsing Hua University, is a uniform user interface by which Grid users can design workflow, submit jobs, manage data, monitor job and resource status, etc. In this paper, we will present the development of the data management system for Taiwan UniGrid. As the distribution of storage resources and the growth of data size, the needs for efficient Grid data management are continuously increasing.

In these years, many research and scientific organizations have engaged in building data management and storage tools for Grids, such as SDSC SRB