Mapping workflows onto Grid resources within an SLA context

Abstract

The mapping of workflows on Grid resources differs from mapping a single job, as dependencies between the subjobs has to be considered and resolved. This is a major task, if underlying Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have to be satisfied, which define the deadline for the entire workflow but also allow flexibility while assigning the subjobs to resources. Therefore, new requirements regarding selection of optimal resource destination and satisfying multiple time constraints are important issues, which are not completely addressed by existing methods. This paper presents a method which performs an efficient and precise assignment of workflow subjobs to Grid resources with respect to SLAs and subjob dependencies. The quality of the created results is evaluated with a number of experiments and compared to the results of existing planning tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.