Managing scientific processes on the eMinerals minigrid using BPEL

The eMinerals mini-grid encapsulates a wide range of resources and services deployed across six sites in the United Kingdom. Scientists require means of exploiting these services in a fully integrated manner through the definition of computational processes specifying the sequence of tasks and services they require. The deployment of such processes, however, can prove difficult in networked environments, due to the presence of firewalls, software requirements and platform incompatibility. We propose here an architecture that builds on a delegation model by which scientist may rely on middle-tier services to orchestrate subsets of the processes on their behalf. For this purpose, we exploit the capabilities of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard, and other Web Service tools and standards, such as GridSAM and the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL). We define a set of inter-related workflows that correspond to basic patterns observed on the eMinerals mini-grid. These will enable scientists to incorporate job submission and monitoring, data storage and transfer management, and automated metadata harvesting in a single unified process, which they may control from their desktops. 1