Data grid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that In Memory Data Grid be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, the introduction of this article may need to be rewritten.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page and read the layout guide to make sure the section will be inclusive of all essential details.

This article is about a type of computer system. For the graphical user interface element, see grid view.

A data grid is a grid computing system that deals with data — the controlled sharing and management of large amounts of distributed data. These are often, but not always, combined with computational grid computing systems.

Many scientific and engineering applications require access to large amounts of distributed data (terabytes or petabytes). The size and number of these data collections has been growing rapidly in recent years and will continue to grow as new experiments and sensors come on-line, the costs of computation and data storage decrease and performances increase, and new computational science applications are developed.

Current large-scale data grid projects include the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), and the Real-time Observatories, Applications, and Data management Network (ROADNet), all of which make use of the SDSC Storage Resource Broker as the underlying data grid technology. These applications require widely distributed access to data by many people in many places. The data grid creates virtual collaborative environments that support distributed but coordinated scientific and engineering research.