Pewss: A platform of extensible workflow simulation service for workflow scheduling research
Author(s) -
Tsai MengHan,
Lai KuanChou,
Chang HsiYa,
Chen Kuan Fu,
Huang KuoChan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.2555
Subject(s) - computer science , workflow , workflow technology , workflow management system , scheduling (production processes) , distributed computing , workflow engine , cloud computing , bottleneck , software engineering , database , operating system , embedded system , engineering , operations management
Summary This paper presents a Platform of Extensible Workflow Simulation Service (Pewss), which we have developed to provide a cloud service for aiding research work in workflow scheduling. The simulation has been a major tool for performance evaluation and comparison in workflow scheduling research. However, researchers usually have to develop their own simulation programs with limited functionality, simply outputting summarized performance results. Pewss has been developed for easing and improving current practices in conducting performance simulations during studying of existing workflow scheduling algorithms or designing of new scheduling algorithms. Pewss has been designed based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, adopting a multiuser Web‐based client/server architecture. Conducting simulation experiments on Pewss, researchers simply have to implement the scheduling algorithm under study instead of a whole simulation environment, allowing them to focus on their research work without spending unnecessary efforts on the simulation implementation details. Pewss provides the visualization of a workflow execution schedule based on simulation results, offering a convenient way for researchers to gain an insight into the effectiveness, characteristics, and performance bottleneck of scheduling algorithms. As a multiuser environment, Pewss also provides functionality for researchers to facilitate comparative performance analysis and collaborative research works effectively. Pewss has been used in our research work on task‐parallel workflow scheduling and has been planned to be extended to support other types of workflow scheduling research problems, eg, mixed‐parallel workflows.