Random access file service - A service for randomly accessing remote data in grid environment

In grid computing environment, applications are frequently executed at sites that are distant from their data. So data access mechanisms that could hide the complexity of remote data accessing via standard I/O interfaces and permit randomly access to any part of a data are required. To address the requirement, a data access service called Random Access File (RAF) service will be promoted in this paper. This service makes use of the Globus Toolkit and provides a set of WSRF service interfaces that can be easily integrated with client applications written by any programming language. With its random access feature, applications can access arbitrary part of a dataset. Transfer data using attachments, parallel data transfer, and buffer adjustment technologies are also used to enhance the performance of the data movement. Finally, this paper presents micro-benchmark studies to provide analysis of the performance improvement.