Grid Deployment Experiences : The path to a production quality LDAP based grid information system

This paper reports on the deployment experience of the de-facto grid information system, Globus MDS (Meta-data Directory Service) [1], in a large scale production grid and how this experience led to the development of an information caching system based on a standard OpenLDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) [2] database. The paper then describes how this caching system was developed further, from the results of performance and scalability tests, into a production quality information system. The generic information provider is also introduced and the reasons for its development explained.