Workflow Enactment Engine Research Articles

Utilization of workflow management system for virtual machine instance management on cloud

SummaryThe concept of virtualization is one of the most important technologies to construct a cloud service, and especially hardware virtualization is indispensable for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) where the cloud offering, infrastructure, is usually provided as a pool of virtual machine (VM) instances. For that reason, many public IaaS clouds like Amazon Web Service and private cloud toolkits such as Eucalyptus and OpenStack provide users with methods for managing VM instances via APIs, command‐line tools, web services, and so on. These are, however, not easy to use or customize for the average end users, especially for those in scientific research areas who just want to perform their work on a cloud and do not need to know the underlying technologies that much. Utilizing workflow management systems (WfMSs) in managing VMs on a cloud can alleviate these difficulties. Users only need to describe parameters needed for VMs and enact the workflow on a workflow enactment engine using user‐friendly interfaces. We propose a management scheme for VM instances on a cloud with the WfMS in this paper. We present a preliminary study on integrating cloud and WfMS focusing on management of VM instances and show an early implementation for a proof of concept with detailed explanations and possible usage scenarios. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Towards Next Generation Provenance Systems for e-Science

e-Science helps scientists to automate scientific discovery processes and experiments, and promote collaboration across organizational boundaries and disciplines. These experiments involve data discovery, knowledge discovery, integration, linking, and analysis through different software tools and activities. Scientific workflow is one technique through which such activities and processes can be interlinked, automated, and ultimately shared amongst the collaborating scientists. Workflows are realized by the workflow enactment engine, which interprets the process definition and interacts with the workflow participants. Since workflows are typically executed on a shared and distributed infrastructure, the information on the workflow activities, data processed, and results generated (also known as provenance), needs to be recorded in order to be reproduced and reused. A range of solutions and techniques have been suggested for the provenance of data collection and analysis; however, these are predominantly workflow enactment engine and domain dependent. This paper includes taxonomy of existing provenance techniques and a novel solution named VePS (The Vienna e-Science Provenance System) for e-Science provenance collection.

WS-RF Workflow in Triana

This paper describes the integration of WS-RF functionality into the graphical workflow enactment engine Triana. The motivation for our work is the belief that standardized communication models as represented by the numerous Web services related specifications will enrich the semantic content of service intercommunication and are likely to achieve widespread adoption. These two features will help to facilitate the kind of dynamic binding of services advocated by Service Oriented Architectures. Furthermore we maintain that exposing the capabilities offered by these specifications to the end user in a simple and intuitive manner is essential if they are to be used intelligently and flexibly, particularly when the specifications do not address the functional semantics of a service as is the case with WS-RF. We examine the possibilities that WS-RF offers to workflow creation and execution, particularly how it enables a number of optimizations which are useful in scientific workflows to be performed in a standardized manner, and describe the visual interpretation of WS-RF, the underlying technologies that enable this interpretation as well as issues arising from the integration of WS-RF into Triana.