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K-WF Grid at a glance

The Knowledge-based Workflow System for Grid Applications (K-Wf Grid) addresses the need for a better infrastructure for the future Grid environment. The Grid as a vast space of partially-cooperating, partially-competing Grid services tends to be a very dynamic and complex environment. In order to address the complexity in using and controlling the next generation Grid, the consortium adopted the approaches envisioned by semantic Web and Grid communities in a novel, generic infrastructure. The K-Wf Grid system assists its users in composing powerful Grid workflows by means of a rule-based expert system.

K-Wf Grid is a middleware solution which could be applied and used:

as a whole - enabling the configuration of complex semantic-based Grid execution environment
and also as separate modules

As a whole, the K-Wf Grid middleware can be used to set-up and maintain a complex Grid environment where the monitored and optimized execution of workflows is necessary or can improve the quality of work and results. The impact of the solutions proposed has been evaluated with end users and interested potential customers after the project prototype deployment: So far, it is possible to consider that major impacts are possible

on technical developers work – K-Wf Grid middleware should allow them to configure and manage easily complex web service grid configuration,

and on customers’ quality of work – easing the successful completion of heavy and/or complex tasks.

Challenges Addressed

The main challenges addressed the project were related to the enablement of the knowledge-based support of workflow construction and execution in a Grid computing environments. In order to achieve this objective the consortium members developed a system that enables users to:

semi-automatically compose a workflow of Grid services,

execute the composed workflow application in a Grid computing environment,

monitor the performance of the Grid infrastructure and the Grid applications,

analyze the resulting monitoring information,

capture the knowledge that is contained in the information by means of intelligent agents,

and finally to reuse the joined knowledge gathered from all participating users in a collaborative way in order to efficiently construct workflows for new Grid applications.

The objectives of the Project led to the implementation of K-Wf Grid Unified Solution that can be downloaded here