One limit of NWS is centralized control: in order to obtain data, one has to address (possibly indirectly) the nameserver, specifiying the id of the sensor.
The distributed nature of the LDAP architecture is appealing to solve this problem: information is organized hierarchically, and the resulting tree (might be) distributed over different servers.
The hierachy often reflects the organization of the Grid: the first level under the root is composed of continental networks, below are national networks and next local networks. Leaves are single resources, like clusters of computers, single computers or storage elements.
The well known Globus toolkit is based on LDAP.
However, the LDAP archtecture is appropriate to store static information, like the number of processors in a cluster, or the size of a disk partition.
When data are more volatile, the LDAP architecture is the wrong
choice: it is unsuitable to support frequent write
operations.
Examples of characteristics that induce frequent writes:
In all these cases the LDAP architecture suffers serious
performance and scalability problems.
next: Store observations in a SQL database
previous: Network Weather Service
up: Seminar May 16, 2003