Distributed Metadata Management Based on Hierarchical Bloom Filters in Data Grid

Distributed metadata management is an important issue in the design and implementation of Data Grid. The key challenge lies in the strategies of metadata synchronization and the representation of the distributed metadata. We have designed a Hierarchical Bloom Filter, which consists of two level Bloom filters, to facilitate the metadata management. A Recent Bloom Filter at the top level is based on the list of recent accessed files while a Summary Bloom Filter at the bottom level represents the set of entire files. Furthermore, we propose a novel update scheme to make Recent Bloom Filters synchronized among metadata servers. Each metadata server could use the Hierarchical Bloom Filters to reduce the update frequency and the network overhead. The experimental results show that the Hierarchical Bloom Filters improve the performance and scalability of Data Grid markedly.