Managing Distributed Files with RNS in Heterogeneous Data Grids

This paper describes the management of files distributed in heterogeneous Data Grids by using RNS (Resource Namespace Service). RNS provides hierarchical namespace management for name-to-resource mapping as a key technology to use Grid resources for different kinds of middleware. RNS directory entries and junction entries can contain their own XML messages as metadata. We define attribute expressions in XML for the RNS entries and give an algorithm to access distributed files stored within different kinds of Data Grids. The example in this paper shows how our Grid application can retrieve the actual locations of files from the RNS server. An application can also access the distributed files as though they were files in the local file system without worrying about the underlying Data Grids. This approach can be used in a Grid computing system to handle distributed Grid resources.