© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Workflow Support for Advanced Grid-Enabled Computing Fenglian Xu *, M. Hakki Eres *, Feng Tao ‡, and Simon J. Cox * * School of Engineering Sciences and ‡ School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ UK e-Science Programme All Hands Meeting (AHM 2004) Nottingham, 31/8/2004 – 3/9/2004.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Outline Introduction Workflow Tool Features –Workflow Composition –Workflow Instantiation and Validation –Submission and Monitoring –Compute Resource Management –Debugging Experiences of users with different tools Conclusions and Future Work

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Introduction The Geodise project aims to build a service- oriented computing environment, which enables users to perform complicated computations within and across their network boundaries. The motivation of this research is to provide an integration environment for engineers to perform a Grid-enabled computing with minimum programming requirements. A workflow tool is required to provide a GUI environment.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Workflow execution environments iSight ModelCenter Triana etc.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, iSight

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, ModelCenter

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Triana

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Workflow Tool The workflow tool provides the following functions: –Construction –Instantiation –Validation –Submit to workflow engine for running –Debugging –Run-time monitoring and steering The workflow nodes include: –task nodes, –conditions nodes, –loop nodes, –join nodes –connection nodes.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Geodise Database Globus Server Graphical Workflow Tool Matlab Scripting Environment Compute ToolboxDatabase Toolbox OptionsMatlab Compute Toolbox API Database Toolbox API Knowledge Toolbox API Knowledge Repository Metadata and Structure Repository Computation Globus Server #1 Globus Server #N Condor Cluster Globus Server / Condor Node Condor Master Condor Node #1 Engineer Knowledge Toolbox Condor Node #N Applications Pro/Engineer ICAD Catia IDEAS CAD Gambit/Fluent Abaqus Catia HYDRA Analysis Globus Servers Globus and Condor Job Managers JavaMatlab Metadata Webservice Physical files, scripts, and outputs Results by GridFTP Results Local Filesystem Matlab Script Grid Job Submission Results Metadata by webservice Geodise Architecture

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Main Frame of the Workflow Tool

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Components and Knowledge Views

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Workflow Construction

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Compute Resources

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Workflow Instantiation and Validation A constructed workflow is a concept workflow, which has not been necessarily instantiated. Only the instance of the concept workflow can be executed in a run-time environment. The instance of workflow has to be validated before a submission. The configured workflow can be deployed to a set of Grid-enabled computer resources, such as the UK e-Science Grid. The validation of a workflow checks availability of task nodes against the selected Matlab server.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Submission and Monitoring A valid workflow instance can be submitted to a remote or a local Matlab server. This process first generates a Matlab script of the workflow and then submits the script to the remote Matlab server via the Globus job submission. Run-time process messages and the output results can be monitored from the workflow tool. Final results can also be viewed.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Monitoring Results

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Compute Resource Management HostnameExecutableDirectory Authentication, job submission, and file transfer times Grid status

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Experiences of users with different tools The workflow tool has been released to the Computational Engineering and Design Centre (CEDC), University of Southampton. CEDC researchers are using other commercial optimisation tools, such as iSIGHT and ModelCenter, to perform their design search and optimisation computations. The Geodise toolboxes proved to be very flexible and powerful as they rely on open standards and Grid technologies.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, OptionsMatlab OptionsMatlab is a Matlab interface to the Options design exploration system. The OptionsMatlab interface allows users to perform engineering design search and optimisation techniques directly from the Matlab environment. We have recently exposed this functionality to the Workflow Tool, so that users can easily perform optimisation processes on various resources on the Grid.

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, A simple workflow showing the usage of OptionsMatlab

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, OptionsMatlab structures

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, The createOptionsStructure function

© Geodise Project, University of Southampton, Conclusions and Future Work Geodise workflow tool provides a GUI for the engineers to perform their complicated computing tasks. This tool provides an efficient and economical way for the engineers to perform their optimisations. The knowledge advisor enables the user to quickly construct a workflow or search for an existing workflow with a key word within or across networks. The database system allowes the user to archive the workflows and together with the associated metadata. Future work includes the implementation of run-time plot monitoring and steering. Further research can be done on exploring to generate BPEL4WS as an additional feature of the workflow tool.