Hi Neil, Quoting [Neil P Chue Hong] (Jan 31 2007):
Notes from OGSA-ByteIO Session at OGF19, Chapel Hill ====================================================
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With GridFTP, because of the lack of partial transfer you could implement something in which the first time you talk to the service, you get sent back information to gridftp the whole thing (file?), then store it locally and access chunks back on client - could implement this but it is a silly way to do it. Basically GridFTP is targetted to moving the whole chunk of data, whereas ByteIO targetted to being cleverer at getting just the bytes it needs.
Maybe I am missing something here, but GridFTP as protocol _does_ support partial file access, doesn't it? It is not implemented in all GridFTP servers though AFAIK. The spec says (I may not have the latest version though, will check): All implementations of this specification SHOULD implement the following Partial File Transfer ERET module: ERET <SP> PFT="<offset>,<length>" <filename> offset::= string representation of a positive 64 bit integer length::= string representation of a positive 64 bit integer Note that the offset specified here is the offset in the file and is not related to the offset specified in the MODE E header, which is the offset in the transfer over the wire. Cheers, Andre. -- "So much time, so little to do..." -- Garfield