Towards A Grid File System Based On A Large-Scale Blob Management Service

This paper addresses the problem of building a grid file system for applications that need to manipulate huge data, distributed and concurrently accessed at a very large scale. In this paper we explore how this goal could be reached through a cooperation between the Gfarm grid file system and Blob Seer, a distributed object management system specifically designed for huge data management under heavy concurrency. The resulting BLOB-based grid file system exhibits scalable file access performance in scenarios where huge files are subject to massive, concurrent, fine-grain accesses. This is demonstrated through preliminary experiments of our prototype, conducted on the Grid'5000 testbed.