Grid Architecture Storage — Utilising Grid Computing for Dynamic Data Storage

Grid architecture storage (GAS) is based on the concept that the grid computing architecture can be manipulated in order to facilitate data storage on the grid. This paper describes the software that has been developed to prove this concept. The software utilises volatile resources on distributed grid nodes - primarily random access memory - to store data dynamically by shifting the data from node to node without transferring the data to persistent storage. A suite of applications that exercise this theory has been developed using the Alchemi .NET grid computing framework, showing that the dynamic storage grid is a feasible grid computing application. Users are able to distribute files from their desktop computers across the Internet, benefiting from the unused resources that are available on computers all over the world.