Grid-Flow: a Grid-enabled scientific workflow system with a Petri-net-based interface

Advances in computer technologies have enabled scientists to explore research issues in their respective domains at scales greater and finer than ever before. The availability of efficient data collection and analysis tools presents researchers with vast opportunities to process heterogeneous data within a distributed environment. To support the opportunities enabled by massive computation, a suitable scientific workflow system is needed to help the users to manage data and programs, and to design reusable procedures of scientific experimental tasks. In this paper, the design and prototype implementation of a scientific workflow infrastructure, called Grid-Flow, is presented. Grid-Flow assists researchers in specifying scientific experiments using a Petri-net-based interface. The Grid-Flow infrastructure is designed as a Service Oriented Architecture with multi-layer component models. The contributions of Grid-Flow are as follows: (1) a new, lightweight, programmable Grid workflow language, Grid-Flow Description Language, is provided to describe the workflow process in a Grid environment; (2) a Petri-net-based user interface, based on the Generic Modeling Environment, is demonstrated to help the user design the workflow process with a Petri-net model; and (3) a program integration component of the Grid-Flow system is presented to integrate all possible programs into the system. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.