Mapping Abstract Complex Workflows onto Grid Environments

Ewa Deelman, James Blythe, Yolanda Gil, Carl Kesselman, Gaurang Mehta, Karan Vahi, Kent Blackburn, Albert Lazzarini, Aadam Arbree, Richard Cavanaugh, & Scott Koranda

Published March 2003, SCEC Contribution #799

In this paper we address the problem of automatically generating job workflows for the Grid. These workflows describe the execution of a complex application built from individual application components. In our work we have developed two workflow generators: the first (the Concrete Workflow Generator CWG) maps an abstract workflow defined in terms of application-level components to the set of available Grid resources. The second generator (Abstract and Concrete Workflow Generator, ACWG) takes a wider perspective and not only performs the abstract to concrete mapping but also enables the construction of the abstract workflow based on the available components. This system operates in the application domain and chooses application components based on the application metadata attributes. We describe our current ACWG based on AI planning technologies and outline how these technologies can play a crucial role in developing complex application workflows in Grid environments. Although our work is preliminary, CWG has already been used to map high energy physics applications onto the Grid. In one particular experiment, a set of production runs lasted 7 days and resulted in the generation of 167,500 events by 678 jobs. Additionally, ACWG was used to map gravitational physics workflows, with hundreds of nodes onto the available resources, resulting in 975 tasks, 1365 data transfers and 975 output files produced.

Key Words
complex applications, planning, reliability, workflow management

Citation
Deelman, E., Blythe, J., Gil, Y., Kesselman, C., Mehta, G., Vahi, K., Blackburn, K., Lazzarini, A., Arbree, A., Cavanaugh, R., & Koranda, S. (2003). Mapping Abstract Complex Workflows onto Grid Environments. Journal of Grid Computing, 1(1), 25-39. doi: 10.1023/A:1024000426962.