Abstract

David Walker a and Ewa Deelman b a School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF24 3AA, United Kingdom b USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA
The Grid computing community is converging on a service-oriented architecture in which applications are composed from geographically-distributed, interacting web services, and are expressed in a workflow description language, usually based on XML. Such workflows are viewed as offering a useful representation of service-based applications or applications composed of standalone components that are to be run in a distributed environment. A workflow can be conveniently displayed as a directed graph in which nodes represent services and edges represent the flow of data and/or control between them. In some sense workflows represent “how the Grid is programmed”, and consequently much recent research has focussed on software and tools that support the use of workflows for grid computing. The semantic description of services, components and workflows, service and resource discovery and selection, and the scheduling of workflows present significant research challenges in making workflows of practical benefit to grid users. The solution of these challenges, in turn, depends on languages for workflow representation, enactment engines for workflow execution, and ontologies.

Date

2007

Authors

David Walker, Ewa Deelman

Journal

Scientific Programming

Volume

15

Issue

4

Pages

191-192

Publisher

New York: John Wiley & Sons, c1992-