Minimizing Data Size for Efficient Data Reuse in Grid-Enabled Medical Applications

This paper presents a data minimization method that aims at reducing overhead for data reuse in grid environments. The data reuse here is designed to promote efficient use of grid resources by avoiding multiple executions of the same computation in a collaborative community. To promote this at the program block level, our method minimizes the data size of attribute values, which are used for identification of computation products stored in a database (DB) server. Because attribute values are specified in queries used for store, search, or retrieval of computation products, their reduction leads to less communication between computing nodes and the DB server, minimizing the runtime overhead of data reuse. We also show some experimental results obtained using a time-consuming medical application. We find that the method successfully reduces the data size of a query from 683 MB to 52 B. This reduction allows our data reuse framework to reduce execution time from approximately 9 minutes to 27 seconds.