Dynamic Provisioning of a Parallel Workflow Management System

Most workflow management systems nowadays are based on centralized client/server architecture. Under this architecture, the response time of request might increase unacceptably when the number of users who login to the system increase quickly and a large amount of requests are sent to the centralized server within a short time period. Parallel server architecture could help to resolve the performance bottleneck of a single server. However, a static parallel architecture with a fixed number of servers is not efficient at resource utilization because the numbers of users and their requests usually change time by time, especially for big and fast changes. This paper presents an effective architecture of dynamic resource-provisioning and then the implementation for a parallel workflow management system. There are a series of experiments conducted and the results indicate that it is an effective approach to handling the time-varying workloads in real world WfMS.