Workflow Engine

Introduction
Gridbus Workflow Engine Documentation
Software Download and License
Compatibility
Bug Reports and Feedback
Credits
Links

Introduction

Gridbus Workflow Engine (GWFE) facilitates users to link standalone applications and execute their workflow applications on Grids. GWFE provides a XML-based workflow language for the users to define tasks and dependencies. It also supports a just in-time scheduling system, thus allowing the resource allocation decision to be made at the time of task execution and hence adapt to changing grid environments. We also use tuple spaces approach to enable an event-driven scheduling architecture for simplifying workflow execution. The latest version GWFE2.0beta has been integrated into Gridbus Broker and supports multiple Grid middleware including GT4.0 Gram Service, PBS, and Sun Grid Engine.

The GWFE is developed by the Gridbus Project, Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab., Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the University of Melbourne, Australia. The project is partially supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant, Storage Technology and the University of Melbourne.

Gridbus Workflow Engine Documentation

For architecture, APIs and installation documentations, refer to the following source:

GWFE User Manual
GWFE Workflow Language (xWFL 2.0)
Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya, A Novel Architecture for Realizing Grid Workflow using Tuple Spaces,Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing (GRID 2004, Nov. 8, 2004, Pittsburgh, USA), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA.
Jia Yu, Rajkumar Buyya and Chen-Khong Tham, Cost-based Scheduling of Workflow Applications on Utility Grids, Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dec. 5-8, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.
Tianchi Ma and Rajkumar Buyya,Critical-Path and Priority based Algorithms for Scheduling Workflows with Parameter Sweep Tasks on Global Grids, Proceeding of the 17th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD 2005), IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Oct. 24-27, 2005, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya, A Taxonomy of Scitific Workflow Systems for Grid Computing, Special Issue on Scientific Workflows, SIGMOD Record, ACM press, Volume 34, Number 3, Sept. 2005.
Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya, Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing, Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 3, Numbers 3-4, Pages: 171-200, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., New York, USA, Sept. 2005.
Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya, A Budget Constrained Scheduling of Workflow Applications on Utility Grids using Genetic Algorithms, Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2006), June 19-23, 2006, Paris, France.
Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya, Scheduling Scientific Workflow Applications with Deadline and Budget Constraints using Genetic Algorithms, Scientific Programming Journal, Volume 14, Issue 3-4, Pages: 217 - 230, ISSN: 1058-9244, IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Nov 2006.
Jia Yu, Michael Kirley, and Rajkumar Buyya, Multi-objective Planning for Workflow Execution on Grids, Proceedings of the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2007, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Sept. 19-21, 2007, Austin, Texas, USA.
Mustafizur Rahman, Srikumar Venugopal, and Rajkumar Buyya, A Dynamic Critical Path Algorithm for Scheduling Scientific Workflow Applications on Global Grids, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Internatio nal Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2007, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dec. 10-13, 2007, Bangalore, India.

List of Improvements

Improvements to be incorporated into future releases include:

to support economy-based workflow scheduling
to support advanced control flow (e.g. cyclic and condition)
to support parameterization

Software and License

The GWFE software and documents are released as "open source" under the GPL license. Copyright The Gridbus Project, GRIDS Lab, The University of Melbourne, 2006.

Download GWFE 2.0beta

Compatibility

For compability, install the following software:

Bug Reports and Feedback

For GWFE bugs and feedback, please email to raj@cs.mu.oz.au

Credits

This release is developed by

Jia Yu, PhD student, GRIDS Lab @ The U. of Melbourne.
Tianchi Ma, Research Fellow, GRIDS Lab @ The U. of Melbourne
Rajkumar Buyya, Project Leader, GRIDS Lab @ The U. of Melbourne.

Links

For additional information, please refer to the following websites: