The paper describes the implementation and experiences gathered from the Spade project which is a decentralized mechanism for data management that has been used in High Energy and Light Source physics experiments. The background and motivations that shaped the Spade project are covered, followed by an outline of the current design of the deployed application.
The operational scenarios that have been developed from the use of Spade in a number of difference contexts are enumerated, after which there is a short discussion on how the implementation of the application has progressed. The paper finishes with some highlight of Spade’s performance and a conclusion about what has been learnt from this project.