Secure Grid Micro-Workflows Using Virtual Workspaces

In this paper, an approach to create virtual cluster environments is presented which enables fine grained service-oriented applications to be executed side by side to traditional batch job oriented Grid applications. Secure execution environments which can be staged into an existing batch job environment are created. A grid enabled workflow engine to build complex application workflows which are executed in the virtual environment is provided. A security concept is introduced allowing cluster worker nodes to expose services to the BPEL engine outside of the private cluster network and thus enabling multi-site workflows in a secure fashion. A prototypical implementation based on Globus Toolkit 4, Virtual Workspaces, ActiveBPEL and Xen is presented.