Designing the Next Generation Grid Information System

Grid information systems play a core role in today's production Grid infrastructures. They provide a coherent view of the Grid services in the infrastructure while addressing the performance, robustness and scalability issues that occur in dynamic, large-scale, distributed systems. As the number of services within these infrastructures continues to grow, it must be ensured that the Grid information system will meet the future scalability requirements. This paper discusses the various fundamental design changes that could be made to improve scalability, and presents preliminary results from the evaluation of various alternative technologies.