Flexible selection of heterogeneous and unreliable services in large-scale grids

Stein, Sebastian, Payne, Terry R. and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2009) Flexible selection of heterogeneous and unreliable services in large-scale grids. [in special issue: ‘Crossing boundaries: computational science, e-Science and global e-Infrastructure I. Selected papers from the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008’ compiled by P. V. Coveney and M. P. Atkinson] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 367 (1897), 2483-2494. (doi:10.1098/rsta.2009.0045).

Record type: Article

Abstract

As Grids become larger and more interconnected in nature, scientists can benefit from a growing number of distributed services that may be invoked on demand to complete complex computational workflows. However, it also means that these scientists become dependent on the cooperation of third-party service providers, whose behaviour may be uncertain, failure-prone and highly heterogeneous. To address this, we have developed a novel decision-theoretic algorithm that automatically selects appropriate services for the tasks of an abstract workflow and deals with failures through redundancy and dynamic re-invocation of functionally equivalent services. In this article, we summarise our approach, describe in detail how it can be applied to a real-world bioinformatics workflow and show that it offers a significant improvement over current service selection techniques.

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