Generalizing the data management of three community grids

Implementing efficient data management is a key challenge of grid computing. Due to seemingly different domain specific requirements, data management solutions have been developed separately for each community grid using a selection of low-level tools and APIs. This has led to unnecessarily complex and overspecialized systems.We describe three D-Grid community grid projects, AstroGrid-D, C3Grid and MediGRID, and analyze to what degree they share the same data management requirements. As a result, we derive the viewpoint that data management systems should provide applications with data access based on declarative and logical addressing, while ensuring the required quality of service (QoS). As a possible approach for this, we describe a conceptual data management system architecture that separates application, community, and resource concerns, using three layers of addressing, thus providing a highly adaptable architecture for different community grids. Additionally, we discuss approaches for the integration of legacy applications and grid scheduling with the proposed architecture.