Flexible high-performance access to distributed storage resources

Describes a software architecture for storage services in computational grid environments. Based upon a lightweight message-passing paradigm, the architecture enables the provision and composition of active, distributed storage services. These services can then cooperatively provide access to distributed storage in a manner potentially optimized for dataset and resource environments. We report on the design and implementation of a distributed file system and a dataset-specific satellite imagery service using the architecture. We discuss data movement and storage issues and implications for future work with the architecture.