Towards Workflow Sharing and Reuse in the ASKALON Grid Environment

As more Grid workflow applications are built, workflow sharing and reuse becomes important, because (i) building a Grid workflow application from scratch is still a challenging task for domain scientists, and (ii) reusing of established and validated workflows not only reduces workflow authoring time but also improves the quality of workflows. In this paper, we present a Grid workflow sharing and reuse framework and its implementation in the ASKALON Grid environment. The framework introduces the ASKALON Workflow Hosting Environment (AWHE) for workflow sharing among different research groups. Extensions of the Abstract Grid Workflow Language (AGWL) for simple reuse of Grid workflow components, sub-workflows, and workflows are also presented. We illustrate the applicability of our framework using two real-world Grid workflows from different scientific domains.