Researchers working on the planning, scheduling and execution of scientific workflows need access to a wide variety of scientific workflows to evaluate the performance of their implementations. We describe basic workflow structures that are composed into complex workflows by scientific communities. We provide a characterization of workflows from five diverse scientific applications, describing their composition and data and computational requirements. We also describe the effect of the size of the input datasets on the structure and execution profiles of these workflows. Finally, we describe a workflow generator that produces synthetic, parameterizable workflows that closely resemble the workflows that we characterize. We make these workflows available to the community to be used as benchmarks for evaluating various workflow systems and scheduling algorithms.
In wide area computing systems, it is often desirable to create remote read-only copies (replicas) of files. Replication can be used to reduce access latency, improve data locality, and/or increase robustness, scalability and performance for distributed applications. We define a replica location service (RLS) as a system that maintains and provides access to information about the physical locations of copies. An RLS typically functions as one component of a data grid architecture. This paper makes the following contributions. First, we characterize RLS requirements. Next, we describe a parameterized architectural framework, which we name Giggle (for GIGa-scale Global Location Engine), within which a wide range of RLSs can be defined. We define several concrete instantiations of this framework with different performance characteristics. Finally, we present initial performance results for an RLS prototype, demonstrating that RLS systems can be constructed that meet performance goals.
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