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Workflows On Web2.0 for Grid Enabled infrastructures in complex Enterprises (wow2green) in a few words...

In the wow2green Business Experiment, our overall objective is to develop a robust, portable enterprise quality portal framework integrated with underlying meta-scheduling middleware and a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) designed to support B2B collaborations by providing advanced multi-user computing workflow management capabilities. Our solution will be complimented with a lightweight, user-friendly Web 2.0 toolset based on open source Vine/Gridsphere product for publishing, annotating, sharing, executing and monitoring workflow execution in a community fashion. The wow2green business experiment will be implemented in the context of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) supported by Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and FedStage Systems.

Case Study

Download the WOW2GREEN – Workflows on Web 2.0 for Grid Enabled Infrastructures in Complex Enterprises (BE23) - case study

Situation

Currently, in order to deal with data and computing intensive workflows EADS engineers are using many products such as iSIGHT-FD. Unfortunately, iSIGHT-FD is offered as a standalone desktop product and the platform has not been integrated neither with a service-based computing infrastructure nor a meta-scheduling middleware offering cross-cluster load balancing and storage management. There is no support for workflow management cross the company boundaries. Moreover, the current situation in most design EADS offices is to use local resources (including HPC) on a discipline basis. While effective till now, this situation shows a number of limitations:

It is not optimizing very well the usage of computing resources,
It is not very open for the new challenge the companies are facing.

Objectives

Main objectives in the wow2green Business Experiment are:

Enable complex workflow executions fully controlled in the portal.
Provide detailed information about simulations on remote computing resources.
Enable efficient platform usage through applying meta-brokering of jobs as well as data dependencies defined in workflow nodes.
Enable to control output data from finished workflow simulations.
Provide an easy and user friendly graphical interfaces for workflow management.
Provide an easy way to define new workflow nodes and definitions.
Provide a repository of workflow nodes and definitions for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Solution

The main objective of the wow2green Business Experiment is to address a real business problem of efficient execution, controlling and sharing of workflows consisting of compute intensive steps as well as advanced data dependencies and control checkpoints among various business departments and users within and outside an Enterprise. Unfortunately, often in many complex sectors such as construction, automotive and aerospace we can observe so called “information chaos”. Each department generates a variety of information sets, performs calculations and exchanges computing results independently with other project participants. Input data is re-entered in new and different formats, data is lost or corrupted, vital information is omitted or not fully exploited. As a consequence, it has become necessary for the management and processing of data to be automated in a scalable and reusable way. Workflows and various standard based data shared models offer an attractive and effective approach to this problem, by allowing a user to formalize the data processing for execution and collection of results in an automated fashion. Consequently, workflow and business process management platforms, of various capabilities and purposes, have been developed to serve these applications but none of them fully exploits and takes advantage of existing Grid technologies and various distributed resource/cluster management systems (DRM) managing HPC resources. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a coherent and easy-to-use Web2.0 grid framework for allowing users to mange advanced computing workflows through intuitive and technology-hiding means that support social collaboration and secure business data sharing within and outside the Enterprise.

Business Impact

EADS as a potential user of BE wow2green solutions develops complex workflows to orchestrate the use of computing resources and data processing services in the course of designing, building and testing their products. EADS has identified a clear need for improved scheduling and workflow management techniques that better utilize their internal storage and computing resources and finally shorten time-to-delivery to retain their edge in highly competitive markets.
This solution will be designed with maximum portability in mind to support interoperability with standards-based grid infrastructures and web portal environments. The entire solution will be based on standards and best practices, from workflow publication and workflow execution, to the Web 2.0 user interfaces themselves. Below there is a comparison of our approach to existing approaches: