The European Grid Forum provides a collaborative, non-standards focused forum to coordinate Grid activities in Europe. It is comprised of private and public research institutions as well as private corporations. Our first stop is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, at the Vrije Universiteit. Globe addresses grid scalability problems by introducing object-based coherency and replication to resources, with a particular focus on the World Wide Web. Their main points are that while much research has been done on improved web caching methods, none of it has focused on the issues of coherency, and that the caching schemes in use today, which are uniform regardless of the content, can be improved by allowing more than one caching policy.
Coherency is fundamental in specifying comprehensive caching and replication policies.
To adequately cache a web object, you must know what kind of coherency is required of the object. Furthermore, to efficiently utilize web resources like caches and communication bandwidth, it is necessary to allow individual web object coherency and caching policies. Globe Objects Globe objects as currently implemented are essentially encapsulated web content, e.g., HTML text, Java applets, images. The object state, which might include the number of times the HTML page has been accessed and the current image carousel index, could be contained in a subobject residing entirely on a third high-reliability server. The support for distribution not only allows Globe objects to dictate how and when they are replicated, but also determines how object state is controlled and updated.