This paper addresses the problem of efficiently storing and accessing massive data blocks in a large-scale distributed environment, while providing efficient fine-grain access to data subsets. This issue is crucial in the context of applications in the field of databases, data mining and multimedia. We propose a data sharing service based on distributed, RAM-based storage of data, while leveraging a DHT-based, natively parallel metadata management scheme. As opposed to the most commonly used

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... d storage infrastructures that provide mechanisms for explicit data localization and transfer, we provide a transparent access model, where data are accessed through global identifiers. Our proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation whose preliminary evaluation provides promising results.