Grid-Oriented Storage: A Single-Image, Cross-Domain, High-Bandwidth Architecture

This paper describes the grid-oriented storage (GOS) architecture and its implementations. A GOS-specific file system (GOS-FS), the single-purpose intent of a GOS OS, and secure interfaces via grid security infrastructure (GSI) motivate and enable this new architecture. As an FTP server, GOS with a slimmed OS, with a total volume of around 150 MB, outperforms the standard GridFTP by 20-40 percent. As a file server, GOS-FS acts as a network/grid interface, enabling a user to perform searches and access resources without downloading them locally. In the real-world tests between Cambridge and Beijing, where the transfer distance is 10,000 km, the multistreamed GOS-FS file opening/saving resulted in a remarkable performance increase of about 2-25 times, compared to the single-streamed network file system (NFSv4). GOS is expected to be a variant of or successor to the well-used network-attached storage (NAS) and/or storage area network (SAN) products in the grid era