AGWL: Abstract Grid Workflow Language
Currently Grid application developers often configure available application components into a workflow of tasks that they can submit for executing on the Grid. We have developed the Abstract Grid Workflow Language (AGWL) for describing Grid workflow applications at a high level of abstraction.
AGWL has been designed such that the user can concentrate on specifying scientific applications without dealing with either the complexity of the Grid or any specific implementation technology such as Web/Grid services, software components or Java classes. AGWL is an XML-based language which allows a programmer to define a graph of activities that refer to computational tasks or user interactions. Activities are connected by control and data flow links. A rich set of constructs is provided to simplify the specification of Grid workflow applications (see below). Moreover, AGWL supports a generic high level access mechanism to data repositories.
- Basic Control Flow Construct
- Sequential constructs: <sequence>
- Conditional constructs: <if>, <switch>
- Loop construct: <while>, <dowhile>, <for>, <forEach>
- Directed Acyclic Graph construct: <dag>
- Advanced Control Flow Construct
- Parallel section constructs: <parallel>
- Parallel loop constructs: <parallelFor>, <parallelForEach>
- Basic Data Flow Construct
- Link activities' outputs to activities' inputs
- Advanced Data Flow Construct
- Data collection and collection distribution constructs (e.g., BLOCK, BLOCK(S), BLOCK(S,L), REPLICA(S) )
- Access abstract data repositories (e.g., file systems, databases, etc.)
AGWL is the main interface to the ASKALON Grid application development environment and has been applied to numerous real world applications, such as WIEN 2k and Invmod/Wasim.
To download AGWL XML schema (right click, then 'save as'): AGWL XML Schema
Related Publications
- Jun Qin and Thomas Fahringer and Radu Prodan
A Novel Graph Based Approach for Automatic Composition of High Quality Grid Workflows » PDF, BIB
Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2009), June 11-13, 2009, Munich, Germany. ACM Press - Jun Qin and Thomas Fahringer
A Novel Domain Oriented Approach for Scientific Grid Workflow Composition » PDF, BIB
Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (Supercomputing 2008, SC|08), November 15-21, 2008 Austin,TX,USA. IEEE Computer Society. - Jun Qin and Thomas Fahringer
Advanced Data Flow Support for Scientific Grid Workflow Applications » PDF, BIB
Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (Supercomputing 2007, SC|07), November 10-16, 2007 Reno,NV,USA. IEEE Computer Society. - Thomas Fahringer, Jun Qin and Stefan Hainzer
Specification of Grid Workflow Applications with AGWL: An Abstract Grid Workflow Language » PDF, BIB
Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid 2005 (CCGrid 2005), Cardiff, UK, May 9-12, 2005 - Jia Yu and Rajkumar Buyya
A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing » PDF
Technical Report, GRIDS-TR-2005-1, Grid Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory, University of Melbourne, Australia, March 10, 2005
