Applying workflow as a service paradigm to application farming

Task farming is often used to enable parameter sweep for exploration of large sets of initial conditions for large scale complex simulations. Such applications occur very often in life sciences. Available solutions enable to perform parameter sweep by creating multiple job submissions with different parameters. This paper presents an approach to farm workflows, employing service oriented paradigms using the WS-VLAM workflow manager, which provides ways to create, control, and monitor workflow applications and their components. We present two service-oriented approaches for workflow farming: task level, whereby task harness acts as services by being invoked on which task to load, and data level, where the actual task is invoked as a service with different chunks of data to process. An experimental evaluation of the presented solution is performed with a biomedical application for which 3000 simulations were required to perform a Monte Carlo study. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.