GridAnt: A Grid Workflow System 

Overview

The popularity of UNIX and DOS was initiated through the availability of sophisticated shells to express command line sequences. Soon it was noticed that complex workflow dependencies as part of the program generation process needed to be expressed. Makefiles have an essential part in automating the complex build process leading to a revolution in software engineering. It allowed users to structure their code and to build sophisticated reusable libraries with ease.

For the Java Platform a similar tool exists under the Apache Project with the name Ant. It provides the Java community with a sophisticated build tool. Dependencies and parallelism can be expressed easily and new tasks can be included with little effort. As ant is used by a large community it has been transitioned to a commodity tool and is the defacto standard for controlling the build processes in Java. Based on our experience with Grid
workflows  we propose to reuse the Ant framework to develop a simple yet powerful client side workflow system for Grids, which named as GridAnt. We find that the availability of the GridAnt framework provides a much needed functionality for testing and developing Grid applications with the alpha version of the Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3).

GridAnt proves to be an excellent tool, not only to map complex client-side workflows, but also as a simplistic client to test the functionality of different Grid services. GridAnt will help applications to make a smooth transition from GT2 to GT3. GridAnt is not claimed as a substitution for more sophisticated and powerful workflow engines such as BPEL4WS, XLANG and WSFL. Nevertheless, applications with simple process flows tightly integrated to work with GT3 can vastly benefit from GridAnt without having to endure any complex workflow architectures. The philosophy adopted by the GridAnt project is to use the workflow engine available with Apache Ant and develop a Grid workflow vocabulary on top of it. In other words, we provide a set of Grid tasks to be used within the Ant framework. 

For further details please refer to the GridAnt whitepaper, and manual.

Contacts

This is a work in progress. For more information please contact:

Gregor von Laszewski
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 South Cass Avenue
Argonne, IL 60439
gregor@mcs.anl.gov
(630) 252 0472

Team

• Kaizar Amin (amin@mcs.anl.gov)
• Gregor von Laszewski (gregor@mcs.anl.gov).

Mailing List

Mailing list for this project is gridant@globus.org. You can subscribe to it by sending an email to majordomo@globus.org with the body subscribe gridant <email address>. An archive for the list is available.  

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Science Division subprogram of the Office of Advance Scientific Computing Research, U.S. Department of Energy under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38. DARPA, DOE, NSF support for the Globus Toolkit research and development. We thank all the members of the Globus Project for their valuable help. 

References

1. Kaizar Amin and Gregor von Laszewski, GridAnt: A Grid Workflow System. Manual, February 2003 (pdf). 

2. Gregor von Laszewski, Beulah Alunkal, Kaizar Amin, Shawn Hampton, and Sandeep Nijsure, GridAnt-Client-side Workflow Management with Ant. Whitepaper, July 2002 (pdf).

3. Sriram Krishnan, Patrick Wagstrom and Gregor von Laszewski, GSFL : A Workflow Framework for Grid Services. In Preprint ANL/MCS-P980-0802, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A., 2002 (pdf)