RRS: Replica Registration Service for Data Grids

Over the last few years various scientific experiments and Grid projects have developed different catalogs for keeping track of their data files. Some projects use specialized file catalogs, others use distributed replica catalogs to reference files at different locations. Due to this diversity of catalogs, it is very hard to manage files across Grid projects, or to replace one catalog with another. In this paper we introduce a new Grid service called the Replica Registration Service (RRS). It can be thought of as an abstraction of the concepts for registering files and their replicas. In addition to traditional single file registration operations, the RRS supports collective file registration requests and keeps persistent registration queues. This approach is of particular importance for large-scale usage where thousands of files are copied and registered. Moreover, the RRS supports a set of error directives that are triggered in case of registration failures. Our goal is to provide a single uniform interface for various file catalogs to support the registration of files across multiple Grid projects, and to make Grid clients oblivious to the specific catalog used.