GLIDE: A Grid-Based Light-Weight Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Environments

The promise of the grid is that it will enable public access and sharing of immense amounts of computational and data resources among a large number of individuals and institutions. However, the current grid solutions make several limiting assumptions that curtail their widespread adoption in the emerging decentralized, resource constrained, embedded, autonomic, and mobile (DREAM) environments: they are designed primarily for highly complex scientific problems, and therefore require powerful hardware and reliable network connectivity; additionally, they provide no application design support to grid users (e.g., scientists). To address these limitations, we present GLIDE, a prototype light-weight, data-intensive middleware infrastructure that enables access to the robust data and computational power of the grid on DREAM platforms. GLIDE embodies a number of features of an existing data grid solution within the framework of an existing DREAM middleware solution with extensive application design capabilities. We illustrate GLIDE on an example mp3 file sharing application. We discuss our early experience with GLIDE and present a set of open research questions.