DRN: A CORBA-Based Distributed Resource Navigation System for Data Grid

Data grids are becoming increasingly important for sharing distributed data and information in collaborative environments. This paper presents a CORBA-based Distributed Resource Navigation system consisting of Resource Agents and Navigation Service. The former one is a middleware that provides applications with a uniform set of operations to access heterogeneous distributed storage resources including file systems and database systems, and archival storage systems. The latter one is a metadata navigation service which is utilized by DRN to improve data publishing and lookup efficiency. Experiments show that CORBA-based DRN can provide the essential data virtualization services, and that Navigation service and Resource agent have a good performance with concurrent accesses.