BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR2003-459
ENTRY:: June 05, 2003
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
TITLE:: Efficient I/O for Computational Grid Applications
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 1
AUTHOR:: Oldfield, Ron A.
DATE:: May 2003
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2003-459.ps.Z
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2003-459.pdf
ABSTRACT:: 
High-performance computing increasingly occurs on "computational grids"
composed of heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems of 
computers, networks, and storage devices that collectively act as a 
single "virtual" computer. A key challenge in this environment is to 
provide efficient access to data distributed across remote data 
servers. This dissertation explores some of the issues associated 
with I/O for wide-area distributed computing and describes an I/O 
system, called Armada, with the following features: a framework to 
allow application and dataset providers to flexibly compose graphs 
of processing modules that describe the distribution, application 
interfaces, and processing required of the dataset before or after 
computation; an algorithm to restructure application graphs to 
increase parallelism and to improve network performance in a wide-area 
network; and a hierarchical graph-partitioning scheme that deploys 
components of the application graph in a way that is both beneficial 
to the application and sensitive to the administrative policies of 
the different administrative domains. Experiments show that 
applications using Armada perform well in both low- and high-bandwidth 
environments, and that our approach does an exceptional job of 
hiding the network latency inherent in grid computing.
NOTE:: This is a reformatted version of Ron Oldfield's Ph.D. dissertation. 
Unlike the dissertation submitted to Dartmouth College, this version 
is single-spaced, uses 11pt fonts, and is formatted specifically for
double-sided printing. 
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR2003-459