December 2006; Stefano Beco, Barbara Cantalupo, Annalisa Terracina

Abstract:
The Grid is currently living an exciting evolution step to turn from a niche technological infrastructure to a widely used Business environment. To this aim, Workflows are playing an important role acting as the link towards the well-established Business Process Management environment. A number of Grid projects worldwide are trying to implement this link and create the Business Grid but no definitive proposal has been provided yet. In this paper, we analyse two European Grid projects, Akogrimo and NextGRID, both investigating the Business usage of Grid from architectural perspectives but each one adopting a different approach in proposing solutions. The comparative analysis we report provides interesting elements to define a unified vision of the Next Generation Grids where Workflow Models, Languages, and Engines constitute a fundamental building block. Understanding and sharing this vision can be the first step to get to an effective architectural design for Business Grids.

References:
[1] Next Generation GRIDs Expert Group Report 3, Future for European Grids: GRIDs and Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities, January 2006.
[2] L. Fischer (Ed), 2006 Workflow Handbook, Published in association with WfMC by Future Strategies Inc., FL, USA.
[3] J. Yu and R. Buyya, A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing, Journal of Grid Computing, Vol. 3, Numbers 3-4, Pages: 171-200, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., New York, USA, Sept. 2005.
[4] J. Jaehnert et al: Detailed Overall Architecture. Akogrimo deliverable D3.1.2. 20.02.06. URL:http://www.akogrimo.org/download/Deliverables/Detailed Overall Architecture
[5] S. Kirn et al: Akogrimo Testbed Description. 13 September 2005. Available at http://www.akogrimo.org
[6] A. Terracina et al: Orchestration and Workflow in a mobile Grid environment, to appear in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing (GCC 2006). IEEE Computer Society.
[7] D. Snelling, M. Fisher, A. Basermann, NextGRID Vision and Architecture White Paper V0.9, December 2005. Available at http://www.nextgrid.org.
[8] S. Beco, B. Cantalupo, L. Giammarino, N. Matskanis, M. Surridge, OWL-WS: A Workflow Ontology for Dynamic Grid Service Composition, in Proceedings of 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, pp. 148-155. IEEE Computer Society.
[9] Treadwell, J. (ed.) Open Grid Services Architecture Glossary of Terms. Global Grid Forum OGSA-WG. GFDI. 044, Jan 2005. http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.44.pdf

Source:
Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science′06)