A Service-Oriented Architecture enabling dynamic services grouping for optimizing distributed workflows execution

International audienceIn this paper, we describe a Service-Oriented Architecture allowing the optimization of the execution of service workflows. We discuss the advantages of the service-oriented approach with regard to the enactment of scientific applications on a grid infrastructure. Based on the development of a generic Web-Services wrapper, we show how the flexibility of our architecture enables dynamic service grouping for optimizing the application execution time. We demonstrate performance results on a real medical imaging application. On a production grid infrastructure, the optimization proposed introduces a significant speed-up (from 1.2 to 2.9) when compared to a traditional execution

Research in Business Process Management: A bibliometric analysis

It contains several growing subtopics such as process mining, process flexibility and process compliance. BPM is also highly relevant for numerous related fields, such as Business Intelligence, ERP systems or Knowledge Management. The growing number of publications and the variety of topics in BPM make it useful to apply bibliometric methods on this scientific field. With bibliometric methods, topical clusters, essential authors and the relationships between them can be discovered. In this work, the BibTechMon software from the Austrian Institute of Technology is utilized to perform the bibliometric analyses. As a novelty for the work with BibTechMon, data from Google Scholar is used as the basis of the analyses. The nature of Google Scholar data differs significantly from the data of other scientific databases. These differences lead to changes on how the bibliometric analyses can be performed. After these changes have been assessed, several bibliometric analyses in the BPM field and related fields are performed. As a result of these analyses, diverse topical clusters in BPM and its related fields could be discovered. Additionally, important authors for each cluster and for the BPM field as a whole were determined. In order to evaluate the results of the bibliometric analyses, I conducted an interview on BPM with Professor Reichert, who is an active researcher in the field. Subsequently, his statements are compared with the results of the bibliometric analyses and the match between the bibliometric analyses and his statements is assessed

Uma abordagem de submissão e monitoração de múltiplas tarefas para ambientes de grade computacional utilizando dispositivos móveis

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da ComputaçãoAmbientes de grade computacional são configurações reconhecidas para fornecer alto desempenho para vários tipos de aplicações, através do compartilhamento de uma grande escala de recursos geograficamente distribuídos. Por outro lado, dispositivos móveis são equipamentos interessantes para fornecer aos usuários acesso em qualquer hora e lugar a recursos, informações e serviços. Desta forma, a interação entre estes dois ambientes (isto é, computação em grade e computação móvel) está sendo considerada como uma solução eficiente por diversos usuários, para a obtenção de alto desempenho e fornecimento de uma maior mobilidade na execução de suas aplicações complexas. Entretanto, devido ao crescente volume e distribuição dos dados, e também a necessidade de execução de inúmeras tarefas para tratar estes dados, tornam-se cada vez mais complexos os processos e aplicações para a resolução de problemas a partir de dispositivos móveis. A execução coordenada e combinada de várias tarefas, que trabalham juntas acessando esta grande quantidade de dados, pode facilitar na solução destes problemas complexos que utilizam a infra-estrutura contida em configurações de grade. No entanto, na maioria das pesquisas relacionadas existe a possibilidade de submissão e monitoração de uma tarefa por vez na interface do dispositivo. Nestas, usuários precisam controlar e ordenar a submissão destas tarefas que trabalham juntas para resolver um problema em uma configuração de grade. Desta forma, a falta de um mecanismo automatizado que também forneça uma submissão e monitoração coordenada e organizada dessas várias tarefas torna mais difícil para os usuários de dispositivos móveis resolverem seus problemas, utilizando o poder computacional disponibilizado pela grade. Com o objetivo de proporcionar uma forma melhorada de submissão e monitoração de várias tarefas em grades computacionais, a partir do dispositivo móvel, esta dissertação apresenta como alternativa a utilização do mecanismo de workflow. Este mecanismo oferece uma abordagem diferencial que permite aos usuários de dispositivos móveis submeterem e monitorarem suas aplicações em ambientes de grade de uma maneira automatizada e coordenada. Um protótipo foi projetado e implementado para validar a proposta. Em nossos experimentos, o mecanismo de workflow provou ser eficiente. A utilização do workflow nestes dispositivos, nos permitiu concluir que a junção destas duas áreas traz melhorias para os usuários destes aparelhos, permitindo uma melhor utilização da configuração de grade. Exemplos das melhorias alcançadas com a adoção desta abordagem são: uma maior agilidade e um menor consumo de energia de bateria para submeter e monitorar várias tarefas do que a forma utilizada nas pesquisas relacionadas. Exemplos de workflows de bioinformática foram empregados, onde usuários foram capazes de acompanhar passo a passo seu progresso de execução transparentemente. Por fim, foram desenvolvidas novas funcionalidades e informações detalhadas da execução workflow

Pattern operators for grid

The definition and programming of distributed applications has become a major research issue due to the increasing availability of (large scale) distributed platforms and the requirements posed by the economical globalization. However, such a task requires a huge effort due to the complexity of the distributed environments: large amount of users may communicate and share information across different authority domains; moreover, the “execution environment” or “computations” are dynamic since the number of users and the computational infrastructure change in time. Grid environments, in particular, promise to be an answer to deal with such complexity, by providing high performance execution support to large amount of users, and resource sharing across different organizations. Nevertheless, programming in Grid environments is still a difficult task. There is a lack of high level programming paradigms and support tools that may guide the application developer and allow reusability of state-of-the-art solutions. Specifically, the main goal of the work presented in this thesis is to contribute to the simplification of the development cycle of applications for Grid environments by bringing structure and flexibility to three stages of that cycle through a commonmodel. The stages are: the design phase, the execution phase, and the reconfiguration phase. The common model is based on the manipulation of patterns through pattern operators, and the division of both patterns and operators into two categories, namely structural and behavioural. Moreover, both structural and behavioural patterns are first class entities at each of the aforesaid stages. At the design phase, patterns can be manipulated like other first class entities such as components. This allows a more structured way to build applications by reusing and composing state-of-the-art patterns. At the execution phase, patterns are units of execution control: it is possible, for example, to start or stop and to resume the execution of a pattern as a single entity. At the reconfiguration phase, patterns can also be manipulated as single entities with the additional advantage that it is possible to perform a structural reconfiguration while keeping some of the behavioural constraints, and vice-versa. For example, it is possible to replace a behavioural pattern, which was applied to some structural pattern, with another behavioural pattern. In this thesis, besides the proposal of the methodology for distributed application development, as sketched above, a definition of a relevant set of pattern operators was made. The methodology and the expressivity of the pattern operators were assessed through the development of several representative distributed applications. To support this validation, a prototype was designed and implemented, encompassing some relevant patterns and a significant part of the patterns operators defined. This prototype was based in the Triana environment; Triana supports the development and deployment of distributed applications in the Grid through a dataflow-based programming model. Additionally, this thesis also presents the analysis of a mapping of some operators for execution control onto the Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA). This assessment confirmed the suitability of the proposed model, as well as the generality and flexibility of the defined pattern operatorsDepartamento de Informática and Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Centro de Informática e Tecnologias da Informação of the FCT/UNL; Reitoria da Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Distributed Collaborative Computing Group, Cardiff University, United Kingdom; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia; Instituto de Cooperação Científica e Tecnológica Internacional; French Embassy in Portugal; European Union Commission through the Agentcities.NET and Coordina projects; and the European Science Foundation, EURESCO

Publish/subscribe scientific workflow interoperability framework (PS-SWIF)

Different or similar workflow systems, hosted anywhere on a network, written in any language and running on different operating systems, can easily use the full range of PS-SWIF tools to interoperate with each other. The PS-SWIF approach provides interoperability among a wide range of scientific workflow systems