Balman, M: Data Placement in Distributed Systems

Over the years, scientific applications have become more complex and more data intensive. Especially large scale simulations and scientific experiments in areas such as physics, biology, astronomy and earth sciences demand highly distributed resources to satisfy excessive computational requirements. Increasing data requirements and the distributed nature of the resources made I/O the major bottleneck for end-to-end application performance. Existing systems fail to address issues such as reliability, scalability, and efficiency in dealing with wide area data access, retrieval and processing. We explore data-intensive distributed computing and study challenges in data placement in distributed environments. After analyzing different application scenarios, we develop new data scheduling methodologies and the key attributes for reliability, adaptability and performance optimization of distributed data placement tasks.