A Parallel Data Storage Interface to GridFTP

Most of the grid projects are characterized by accessing huge volumes of data. For supporting this feature, different data services have arisen in the “grid” world. One of the most successful initiatives in that field is GridFTP, a high-performance transfer protocol, based on FTP but optimized for wide area networks. Although GridFTP provides reasonably good performance, GridFTP servers keep constituting a bottleneck for data-intensive applications. One of the most important modules of a GridFTP server is the Data Storage Interface (DSI), which specifies how to read and write to the storage system, allowing the server to transform the data. With the aim of improving the performance of the GridFTP server, we have designed a new DSI, based on MAPFS, a parallel file system. This paper describes this new DSI and its evaluation, showing the advantages of dealing data through this optimized GridFTP server.