Data management in grid applications providers

The application service provider (ASP) model is a valuable candidate to provide simple computing grid access. In this model, users submit requests to execute already deployed applications on their own data. In this context, finding a good server to execute a request is not the only way to increase performances. As the size of the data may be huge, it is also mandatory to avoid useless data transfers between client and servers. Most of existing ASP platforms provide data management services to facilitate and to improve executions by automatically distributing and transferring data. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it presents an efficient data persistence policy for ASP architectures and particularly for the DIET platform. Second, it proposes a parallel (not a comparison) of this service with the NetSolve data management model. The NetSolve approach provides two services to manage data inside the platform: the distributed storage infrastructure, used to provide data transfer and storage and the request sequencing used to decrease network traffic amongst client and servers. The DIET data management model is based on two key points: the data identifiers and the data tree manager (DTM). To avoid multiple transmissions of the same data from a client to a server, the DTM allows to leave data inside the platform after computations while data identifiers are used further by the client to reference its data. In the remainder, we show how these different approaches lead to different programming models and execution performances on the client side.