Metadata services on the Grid

Abstract

We present an interface for metadata access on the Grid, designed to support flexible schema management, efficient retrieval of large result sets and to allow a broad range of implementations. We also describe an implementation of this interface, which supports a wide range of storage back-ends and two access protocols: SOAP and a TCP-streaming-based protocol. This interface and implementation have been selected as the official metadata components of the gLite-EGEE middleware. Finally, we present the results of extensive performance studies, where the two front-ends are compared to evaluate the cost of using SOAP as metadata access protocol.