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Fine-Grain Interoperability of Scientific Workflows in Distributed Computing Infrastructures

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Abstract

Today there exist a wide variety of scientific workflow management systems, each designed to fulfill the needs of a certain scientific community. Unfortunately, once a workflow application has been designed in one particular system it becomes very hard to share it with users working with different systems. Portability of workflows and interoperability between current systems barely exists. In this work, we present the fine-grained interoperability solution proposed in the SHIWA European project that brings together four representative European workflow systems: ASKALON, MOTEUR, WS-PGRADE, and Triana. The proposed interoperability is realised at two levels of abstraction: abstract and concrete. At the abstract level, we propose a generic Interoperable Workflow Intermediate Representation (IWIR) that can be used as a common bridge for translating workflows between different languages independent of the underlying distributed computing infrastructure. At the concrete level, we propose a bundling technique that aggregates the abstract IWIR representation and concrete task representations to enable workflow instantiation, execution and scheduling. We illustrate case studies using two real-workflow applications designed in a native environment and then translated and executed by a foreign workflow system in a foreign distributed computing infrastructure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 21a, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    Kassian Plankensteiner, Radu Prodan, Matthias Janetschek & Thomas Fahringer

  2. I3S lab, CNRS, Sophia Antipolis, France

    Johan Montagnat

  3. Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    David Rogers, Ian Harvey & Ian Taylor

  4. MTA SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary

    Ákos Balaskó & Péter Kacsuk

Authors
  1. Kassian Plankensteiner
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  2. Radu Prodan
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  3. Matthias Janetschek
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  4. Thomas Fahringer
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  5. Johan Montagnat
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  6. David Rogers
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  7. Ian Harvey
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  8. Ian Taylor
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  9. Ákos Balaskó
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  10. Péter Kacsuk
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Correspondence to Kassian Plankensteiner.

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Plankensteiner, K., Prodan, R., Janetschek, M. et al. Fine-Grain Interoperability of Scientific Workflows in Distributed Computing Infrastructures. J Grid Computing 11, 429–455 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-013-9261-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-013-9261-8

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