FICUS - A Federated Service-Oriented File Transfer Framework

The engineering data of a large enterprise is typically distributed over a wide area and archived in a variety of file systems and databases. Access to such information is crucial to team members and relevant processing services (applications, tools and utilities) in a concurrent engineering setting. However, this is not easy because there is no simple way to efficiently access the information without being knowledgeable about various file systems, file servers, and networks, especially when complex domain related data files get bigger. In a concurrent engineering environment, there is every need to be aware of the transparent and dynamic data perspectives of the other members of the team. We have developed a Federated Service-Oriented File Transfer Framework called FICUS (Files In Chunks Utilizing Storage) with the objective to form dynamic federations of network services that provide engineering data, applications and tools on a grid. This framework fits the SORCER philosophy of grid interactive service-oriented programming, where users create distributed metaprograms using federated providers along with FICUS repository providers. Our paper describes the methodology of how FICUS works along with the details of the implementation and extensions planned for the future. We believe the performance and reliability offered by FICUS will make it a very useful distributed file transfer protocol for a large design team and will make it very convenient to integrate heterogeneous legacy file systems.