A grid middleware for data management exploiting peer-to-peer techniques

In this paper, we describe a service-oriented middleware architecture for Grid environments which enables efficient data management. Our design introduces concepts from Peer-to-Peer computing in order to provide a scalable and reliable infrastructure for storage, search and retrieval of annotated content. To ensure fast file lookups in the distributed repositories, our system incorporates a multidimensional indexing scheme which serves the need for supporting both exact match and range queries over a group of metadata attributes. Finally, file transfers are conducted using GridTorrent, a grid-enabled, Peer-to-Peer mechanism that performs efficient data transfers by enabling cooperation among participating nodes and balances the cost of file transfer among them. The proposed architecture is the middleware component used by the GREDIA project, in which both media and banking partners plan to share large loads of annotated content.