Ewa Deelman
ISI

"AI-based approaches to workflow management in Grids"

10/31/2003: 10:30am - 12:00pm
11th Floor Large Conference Room

Abstract: Grid computing promises users the ability to harness the power of large numbers of heterogeneous, distributed resources: computing resources, data storage systems, instruments etc. The vision is to enable users and applications to seamlessly access these resources to solve complex large-scale problems. Scientific, data intensive applications are no longer being developed as monolithic codes. Instead, standalone application components are combined to process the data in various ways. The applications can now be viewed as complex workflows, which consist of various transformations performed on the data. Because of the large amounts of computation and data involved, these workflows require the Grid to execute efficiently. In the current environment, users need to discover resources manually and schedule the jobs directly onto the Grid, essentially composing detailed workflow descriptions by hand. This leaves users struggling with the complexity of the Grid and weighing which resources to use, where to run the computations, where to access the data etc. We are working to automate this workflow generation process as far as possible (but no further). We describe an architecture that integrates several grid services to take a high-level workflow specification, locate appropriate resources and oversee its execution on the Grid. Within this architecture we use AI planning to generate workflows from logical descriptions of the required data. The system has been used to execute gravitational physics workflows involving hundreds of individual tasks. Some of the challenges for planning in Grids include (1) how to distribute the knowledge and the reasoning processes for workflow generation across the Grid and (2) monitoring and repairing workflows as the environment changes during their execution.

About Jim Blythe: Jim Blythe is a computer scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division at ISI. His interests include planning, knowledge acquisition and intelligent user interfaces. He is currently working on planning for the grid and on acquiring advice for planning systems. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 on planning under uncertainty.

About Ewa Deelman: Ewa Deelman is a Research Team Leader at the Center for Grid Technologies at the USC Information Sciences Institute and an Assistant Research Professor at the USC Computer Science Department. Dr. Deelman's research interests include the design and exploration of collaborative scientific environments based on Grid technologies, with particular emphasis on managing large amounts of data and metadata as well as workflow management. At ISI, Dr. Deelman is part of the Globus project, which designs and implements middleware for the Grid. Prior to joining ISI in 2000, she was a Senior Software Developer at UCLA conducting research in the area of performance prediction of large-scale applications on high performance machines. Dr. Deelman received her PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Computer Science in 1997 in the area of parallel discrete event simulation.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006