The Replica Management in a Spatial Data Grid

The Barn project, a spatial data grid prototype under development currently, provides a grid environment for applications of the nationwide geological survey data. Within Barn, in order to reduce data access latency, avoid a single point of failure, and increase the performance and load-balance of the system, we have designed and implemented a set of replica management services. These services, based on WSRF, offer users a convenient way to partition a large logical layer into multiple fragments, enable replication and management of the tiled spatial data, maintenance of replica consistency, catalog consistency and replica synchronization. This paper describes the framework and design of the replica management and evaluate its performance under the context of the Barn project.