DHPC Technical Report DHPC-091
An Environment for Workflow Applications on Wide-Area Distributed
Systems
H.A. James, K.A. Hawick and P.D. Coddington
Archived: 1 June 2000
Published in
Proc. of Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-34),
Maui, January 2001.
Abstract
Workflow techniques are emerging as an important approach for the
specification and management of complex processing tasks. This
approach is especially powerful for utilising distributed data and
processing resources in widely-distributed heterogeneous systems.
We describe our DISCWorld distributed workflow environment for
composing complex processing chains, which are specified as a
directed acyclic graph of operators. Users of our system can
formulate processing chains using either graphical or scripting
tools. We have deployed our system for image processing
applications and decision support systems.
We describe the technologies we
have developed to enable the execution of these processing chains
across wide-area computing systems. In particular we present our
Distributed Job Placement Language (based on XML) and various Java
interface approaches we have developed for implementing the workflow
metaphor. We outline a number of key issues for implementing a
high-performance, reliable, distributed workflow management system.
Keywords: Workflow; DISCWorld; distributed computing; Java; XML.
PDF version
PostScript version (gzip compressed)
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