The Livny and Plank-Beck Problems: Studies in Data Movement on the Computational Grid

Over the last few years the Grid Computing research community has become interested in developing data intensive applications for the Grid. These applications face significant challenges because their widely distributed nature makes it difficult to access data with reasonable speed. In order to address this problem, we feel that the Grid community needs to develop and explore data movement challenges that represent problems encountered in these applications. In this paper, we will identify two such problems that we have dubbed the Livny Problem and the Plank-Beck Problem. We will also present data movement scheduling techniques that we have developed to address these problems.