A transactional grid workflow service for ShanghaiGrid

As grid technology is expanding from scientific computing to business applications, transactional workflow management emerges as one of the most important core services for grids. The ShanghaiGrid launched by the Shanghai municipality is a city grid that aggregates most of the heterogeneous supercomputers, traffic data and others distributed in multiple organisations in Shanghai. In this paper, we propose a transactional grid workflow service (GridTW) for the ShanghaiGrid to guarantee the reliability and automatisation of e-business applications. The paper focuses on how to provide a transaction support based on grid characteristics and combine the transaction service with workflow management. We present a coordination algorithm for the management of transactional grid workflows, and validate correctness of the algorithm through Petri nets. The paper also presents how to discover grid services on which application operations are executed and to improve the flexibility of workflow control.