Gathering at the Well: Creating Communities for Grid I/O

Grid applications have demanding I/O needs. Schedulers must bring jobs and data in close proximity in order to satisfy throughput, scalability, and policy requirements. Most systems accomplish this by making either jobs or data mobile. We propose a system that allows jobs and data to meet by binding execution and storage sites together into I/O communities which then participate in the wide-area system. The relationships between participants in a community may be expressed by the ClassAd framework. Extensions to the framework allow community members to express indirect relations. We demonstrate our implementation of I/O communities by improving the performance of a key high-energy physics simulation on an international distributed system.