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Multi‐layered simulations at the heart of workflow enactment on clouds
Author(s) -
Ostermann Simon,
Kecskemeti Gabor,
Prodan Radu
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3733
Subject(s) - workflow , workflow management system , cloud computing , computer science , workflow technology , workflow engine , scalability , scope (computer science) , distributed computing , software engineering , systems engineering , database , engineering , operating system , programming language
Summary Scientific workflow systems face new challenges when supporting Cloud computing, as the information on the state of the used infrastructures is much less detailed than before. Thus, organising virtual infrastructures in a way that not only supports the workflow execution but also optimises it for several service level objectives (e.g. maximum energy consumption limit, cost, reliability, availability) become reliant on good Cloud modelling and prediction information. While simulators were successfully aiding research on such workflow management systems, the currently available Cloud related simulation toolkits suffer from several issues (e.g. scalability and narrow scope) that hinder their applicability. To address these issues, this article introduces techniques for unifying two existing simulation toolkits by first analysing the problems with the current simulators, and then by illustrating the problems faced by workflow systems. We use for this purpose the example of the ASKALON environment, a scientific workflow composition and execution tool for cloud and grid environments. We illustrate the advantages of a workflow system with directly integrated simulation back‐end and how the unification of the selected simulators does not affect the overall workflow execution simulation performance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.