Towards a Grid Platform for Scientific Workflows Management

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new grid platform for scientific workflows that enhances usability, data management, and fault tolerance, based on an architectural model extending the ActiveBPEL engine.

Contribution

It introduces an architectural model for a scientific workflow platform that integrates new components with ActiveBPEL to improve functionality and usability.

Findings

Designed an architectural model for the platform

Proposed enhancements to ActiveBPEL for scientific workflows

Aimed to improve usability and fault tolerance

Abstract

Workflow management systems allow the users to develop complex applications at a higher level, by orchestrating functional components without handling the implementation details. Although a wide range of workflow engines are developed in enterprise environments, the open source engines available for scientific applications lack some functionalities or are too difficult to use for non-specialists. Our purpose is to develop a workflow management platform for distributed systems, that will provide features like an intuitive way to describe workflows, efficient data handling mechanisms and flexible fault tolerance support. We introduce here an architectural model for the workflow platform, based on the ActiveBPEL workflow engine, which we propose to augment with an additional set of components.