Title: Pratikriti - An Asynchronous Data Replication Service in the GFFS
Abstract: The ability to collaborate by sharing data is crucial for scientists and researchers, particularly for those working on community datasets. Institutions are always looking for ways to automatically replicate the data securely between systems while keeping the data synchronized, ensuring a group of systems have common data. This project describes the design and implementation of Pratikriti, a data replication service with high availability, improved performance and strong data security. The Pratikriti adds support for replication of resources in Genesis II. Genesis II supports the LightweightExport service; which maps the data residing on local machines into the Global Federated File System (GFFS) namespace. The physical copy of the data resides on a local hard disk, but once exported, the data can be accessed via the GFFS from anywhere subject to access control.
Pratikriti extends the LightweightExport service provided by Genesis II to asynchronously replicate the data residing on a users local disk to multiple sites. Users get better Quality of Service (QoS), namely High Availability (HA) and improved performance. Pratikriti acts like a dropbox i.e, the local data is securely replicated and kept eventually consistent among multiple sites without human intervention. The system copes with server failure by transparently switching over to the next available replica server. We show that our solution successfully replicates the data to multiple sites while providing high availability and performance.
Committee: Andrew Grimshaw (Advisor), Marty Humphrey, Haiying Shen, Kevin Skadron (Chair)