e-Business applications on the Grid: a toolkit for centralized workload prediction and access

Enabling e-Business applications on Grid computing has been an important topic of research as the beneficial perspective of Grids lies on solving computational intensive problems by large-scale distributed resources. In this paper we present a toolkit for centralized workload prediction and access, in order to meet the requirements of execution of commercial business processes on Grid infrastructures as well as to take advantage of their cost-effective capability for industrial users. The implementation of centralized workload prediction is achieved with an artificial neural network—available in the toolkit—each time a user completes a job execution. This approach has been adopted and validated within the framework of a GRIA IST project for a specific industrial application, namely 3D image rendering, which meets the e-Business application’s standards. The accuracy of the prediction showed promising results and in combination with the centralized access capability makes e-Business applications feasible on Grids. Copyright c © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.