Grid Workflow Scheduling In WOSE

The success of web services has infuenced the way in which grid applications are being written. Grid users seek to use combinations of web services to perform the overall task they need to achieve. In general this can be seen as a set of services with a workflow document describing how these services should be combined. The user may also have certain constraints on the workflow operations, such as execution time or cost to the user, specified in the form of a Quality of Service (QoS) document. These workflows need to be mapped to a subset of the Grid services taking the QoS and state of the Grid into account – service availability and performance. We propose in this paper an approach for generating constraint equations describing the workflow, the QoS requirements and the state of the Grid. This set of equations may be solved using Integer Linear Programming (ILP), which is the traditional method. We further develop a 2stage stochastic ILP which is capable of dealing with the volatile nature of the Grid and adapting the selection of the services during the life of the workflow. We present experimental results comparing our approaches, showing that the 2-stage stochastic programming approach performs consistently better than other traditional approaches. This work forms the workflow scheduling service within WOSE (Workflow Optimisation Services for eScience Applications), which is a collaborative work between Imperial College, Cardiff University and Daresbury Laborartory.