Enhancing the performance of scientific workflow execution in e-science environments by harnessing the standards based parameter sweep model

Abstract

Certain scientific use cases possess complex requirements to have Grid jobs executed in collections where the jobs' request contains only some variation in different parts. These scenarios can easily be tackled by a single job request which abstract this variation and can represent the same collection. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) standards community modeled this requirement through the Job Submission and Description Language (JSDL) Parameter Sweep specification, which takes a modular approach to handle different variations of parameter sweeps (e.g. document and file sweep). In this paper we present the UNICORE server environment implementing this specification build upon its existing JSDL implementation. We also demonstrate the application of UNICORE's parameter sweep extension for optimizing job executions, which are submitted as a sub-activity of a Taverna based scientific workflow. Further we validate our approach by analyzing performance of the workflow with and without using the parameter sweep extension.