Towards quality of service support for grid workflows

Abstract

Service-oriented workflow languages are being considered as a key programming paradigm for composing Grid applications from basic services. In this paper we present QoS support for grid workflows addressing the special requirements of time-critical Grid applications, as for example medical simulation services. QoS support for grid workflow is currently being developed in the context of the Vienna Grid Environment, a service-oriented Grid infrastructure for the provision of parallel simulation codes as QoS-aware Grid services, which are capable of dynamically negotiating with clients various QoS guarantees, e.g. with respect to execution time and price. We use a real world Grid service for medical image reconstruction to describe the main features of our approach and present the first prototype of a QoS-aware workflow engine which supports dynamic QoS negotiation and QoS-aware workflow execution. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.