An Architectural Overview of the GRelC Data Access Service

Grid computing is an emerging and enabling technology allowing organizations to easily share, integrate and manage resources in a distributed environment. Computational Grid allows running millions of jobs in parallel, but the huge amount of generated data has caused another interesting problem: the management (classification, storage, discovery etc.) of distributed data, i.e., a Data Grid specific issue. In the last decade, many efforts concerning the management of data (grid-storage services, metadata services, grid-database access and integration services etc.) identify data management as a real challenge for the next generation petascale grid environments. This work provides an architectural overview of the GRelC DAS, a grid database access service developed in the context of the GRelC Project and currently used for production/tutorial activities both in gLite and Globus based grid environments.