An interoperable grid workflow management system

Abstract

A WorkFlow Management System (WFMS) is a fundamental componentenabling to integrate data, applications and a wide set of project resources. Although a number of scientific WFMSs support this task, many analysis pipelines require large-scale Grid computing infrastructures to cope with their high compute and storage requirements. Such scientific workflows complicate the management of resources, especially in cases where they are offered by several resource providers, managed by different Grid middleware, since resource access must be synchronised in advance to allow reliable workflow execution. Different types of Grid middleware such as gLite, Unicore and Globus are used around the world and may cause interoperability issues if applications involve two or more of them. In this paperwe describe the ProGenGrid Workflow Management System which the main goal is to provide interoperability among these different grid middleware when executing workflows. It allows the composition of batch; parameter sweep and MPI based jobs. The ProGenGrid engine implements the logic to execute such jobs by using a standard language OGF compliant such as JSDL that has been extended for this purpose. Currently, we are testing our system on some bioinformatics case studies in the International Laboratory of Bioinformatics (LIBI) Project (www.libi.it). © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.