State-of-arts: workflow management for grid computing

Abstract

Grid computing is now becoming a new computing paradigm and solution for distributed systems and applications. Currently, increasing resources are involved in Grid environments and a great deal of applications is running on computational Grids. Unfortunately, Grid computing technology is still far away from reach of inexperienced application users, e.g. computational scientists and engineers. Workflow system, originally coming from business process automation, is introduced into Grid computing to alleviate Grid users’ burden of running applications, especially for complex applications, on computational Grids. In recent years, dozens of workflow systems and model languages are proposed for Grid computing. Workflow management has become an interesting research field of Grid computing. However, great research challenges and issues still remain unsolved, which would block Grid computing paradigm from further acceptance by ad-hoc users. This chapter firstly studies the concepts of workflow, workflow system and workflow management. Current status of workflow management for Grid computing is investigated, including models, languages of popular workflow management systems in computational Grids. Further, major research issues and technological challenges are identified and discussed