On the Design of Virtual Environment Based Workflow System for Grid Computing

The grid computing paradigm offers promising solutions for distributed systems and applications. Currently, increasing resources are involved in grid environments and various applications are running on computational grids. Unfortunately, grid computing technology is still far away from reach of inexperienced application users, e.g. computational scientists and engineers. Workflow systems, originally coming from business process automation, are introduced into grid computing to alleviate grid users´ burden of running jobs, especially for complex applications. Despite the fact that dozen of workflow models, systems and languages are proposed for grid computing, there still remain research issues to be addressed, for example, customization and performance isolation of workflow execution environments. Virtual environments in computational grids, which provide grid users with customized, performance guaranteed resource image, could be a promising solution for the aforementioned problems. This paper discusses our design of workflow systems based on virtual environments in grids. There are various services to support multiple virtual environments in the system, i.e. information service, factory service and repository service for virtual environments. The workflow enactment service can thus execute tasks on various virtual environments created, deployed and managed by these services