Scalable Peer-to-Peer Process Management - The OSIRIS Approach

The functionality of applications is increasingly being made available by services. General concepts and stan-dards like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI support the discov-ery and invocation of single web services. State–of–the– art process management is conceptually based on a cen-tralized process manager. The resources of this coordina-tor limit the number of concurrent process executions, es-pecially since the coordinator has to persistently store each state change for recovery purposes. In this paper, we over-come this limitation by executing processes in a peer-to-peer way exploiting all nodes of the system. By distributing the execution and navigation costs, we can achieve a higher degree of scalability allowing for a much larger through-put of processes compared to centralized solutions. This pa-pers describes our prototype system OSIRIS, which imple-ments such a true peer–to–peer process execution. We fur-ther present very promising results verifying the advantages over centralized process management in terms of scalabil-ity. 1