Adding instruments and workflow support to existing grid architectures

Abstract

Many Grid architectures have been developed in recent years. These range from the large community Grids such as LHG and EGEE to single site deployments such as Condor. However, these Grid architectures have tended to focus on the single or batch submission of executable jobs. Application scientists are now seeking to manage and use physical instrumentation on the Grid, integrating these with the computational tasks they already perform. This will require the functionality of current Grid systems to be extended to allow the submission of entire workflows. Thus allowing the scientists to perform increasingly larger parts of their experiments within the Grid environment. We propose here a set of high level services which may be used on-top of these existing Grid architectures such that the benefits of these architectures may be exploited along with the new functionality of workflows. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.