How to bring together fault tolerance and data consistency to enable Grid data sharing

This paper addresses the challenge of transparent data sharing within computing Grids built as cluster federations. On such platforms, the availability of storage resources may change in a dynamic way, often due to hardware failures. We focus on the problem of handling the consistency of replicated data in the presence of failures. We propose a software architecture which decouples consistency management from fault tolerance management. We illustrate this architecture with a case study showing how to design a consistency protocol using fault-tolerant building blocks. As a proof of concept, we describe a prototype implementation of this protocol within JUXMEM, a software experimental platform for Grid data sharing, and we report on a preliminary experimental evaluation of the proposed approach. Copyright c © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.