MCCF: A distributed grid job workflow execution framework

Abstract

With the explosion of scientific data, distributed scientific applications present great challenges to the existing job workflow execution models over the Grid. Based on the idea of having executable codes as part of Grid resources, a Mobile Code Collaboration Framework (MCCF) utilizing light-weight mobile agent and dynamic services for distributed job workflow execution is proposed in this paper. Instead of the existing light-weight mobile agents, agent core (AC), which is an XML file specifying the functional descriptions of sub-jobs, is used to adapt job workflow execution to the dynamic characteristics of the Grid and to reduce the security risks. In addition, dynamic service mechanism is also introduced to facilitate the multidisplinary scientific cooperation and application integration over the Grid. As a proof-of-concept, a prototype of MCCF is implemented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.