A Light-Weight Grid Workflow Execution Engine Enabling Client and Middleware Independence

We present a generic and light-weight Grid workflow execution engine made available as a Grid service. A long-term goal is to facilitate the rapid development of application-oriented end-user workflow tools, while providing a high degree of Grid middleware-independence. The workflow engine is designed for workflow execution, independent of client tools for workflow definition. A flexible plugin-structure for middleware-integration provides a strict separation of the workflow execution and the processing of individual tasks, such as computational jobs or file transfers. The light-weight design is achieved by focusing on the generic workflow execution components and by leveraging state-of-theart Grid technology, e.g., for state management. The current prototype is implemented using the Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4) Java WS Core and has support for executing workflows produced by Karajan. It also includes plugins for task execution with GT4 as well as a high-level Grid job management framework.