The Kangaroo Approach to Data Movement on the Grid

Access to remote data is one of the principal challenges of grid computing. While performing I/O, grid applications must be prepared for server crashes, performance variations, and exhausted resources. To achieve high throughput in such a hostile environment, applications need a resilient service that moves data while hiding errors and latencies. We illustrate this idea with Kangaroo, a simple data movement system that makes opportunistic use of disks and networks to keep applications running. We demonstrate that Kangaroo can achieve better end-to-end performance than traditional data movement techniques, even though its individual components do not achieve high performance.