The Replica Location Service: Design and Experience

We describe the implementation and evaluate the performance of a Replica Location Service that is part of the Globus Toolkit Versions 3.0 and 4.0. A Replica Location Service (RLS) provides a mechanism for registering the existence of replicas and discovering them. Features of our implementation include the use of soft state update protocols to populate a distributed index and optional Bloom filter compression to reduce the size of these updates. We present the design of the RLS system and different deployment options for the distributed index. We also present performance measurements that demonstrate that RLS scales well for individual servers with millions of entries and hundreds of clients. We describe the use of RLS in several production Grid environments and describe how RLS has been integrated into higher-level data management services.