Abstract
Modern scientific experiments can generate large amounts of data, which may be
replicated and distributed across multiple resources to improve application
performance and fault tolerance. Whilst a number of different replica management
systems exist, particular communities usually adopt a single system. This
creates problems when an application program spans more than one community,
because it may need to target more than one middleware layer. One solution to
this problem is to build a more flexible data access layer above the specific
replica middleware. In this paper, we discuss such an architecture, the Grid
Replication Framework, which provides applications with an abstract interface to
existing replica systems. Further, the framework’s flexible plug-in architecture
makes it easy to support new middleware as it becomes available.