Affiliations: Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan
403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail:
{vkorkhov,dvasunin,wibisono,adam,inda,roos,breit,bob}@science.uva.nl
Abstract: Grid brings the power of many computers to scientists. However, the
development of Grid-enabled applications requires knowledge about Grid
infrastructure and low-level API to Grid services. In turn, workflow management
systems provide a high-level environment for rapid prototyping of experimental
computing systems. Coupling Grid and workflow paradigms is important for the
scientific community: it makes the power of the Grid easily available to the
end user. The paradigm of data driven workflow execution is one of the ways to
enable distributed workflow on the Grid. The work presented in this paper is
carried out in the context of the Virtual Laboratory for e-Science project. We
present the VLAM-G workflow management system and its core component: the
Run-Time System (RTS). The RTS is a dataflow driven workflow engine which
utilizes Grid resources, hiding the complexity of the Grid from a scientist.
Special attention is paid to the concept of dataflow and direct data streaming
between distributed workflow components. We present the architecture and
components of the RTS, describe the features of VLAM-G workflow execution, and
evaluate the system by performance measurements and a real life use case.
Keywords: Grid, data driven workflow engine, direct data streaming
