Components and workflow based Grid programming environment for integrated image-processing applications

摘要

With the development of high-performance computing technologies, Grid computing has emerged as a new infrastructure for applications with resource integration. However, some obstacles for the prevalence of Grid and Grid application developments are still to be overcome, which is largely due to the immature Grid-enabled computing environment and its geographically distributed and non-centralized administrative nature. In order to improve the situation and support Grid applications, a powerful Grid system is proposed as an efficient solution, which enables components and workflow support for loosely coupled and geographically distributed components on a Grid. An image-processing Grid is a project aiming at providing an efficient programming environment. In this paper, we discuss the infrastructure of the integrated environment, a flexible and useful workflow mechanism, a dynamic resource-scheduling strategy to achieve multiple image-processing operations, and an easy-to-use Web portal. In the system, components and workflow techniques provide the benefits of flexibility, reusability and scalability, so that even the unskilled user can easily specify the processing of complex, cooperative applications without knowledge of underlying Grid platform configuration details.