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

The functionality of applications is increasingly being made available by services. General concepts and standards like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI support the discovery and invocation of single web services. State--of--the-- art process management is conceptually based on a centralized process manager. The resources of this coordinator limit the number of concurrent process executions, especially since the coordinator has to persistently store each state change for recovery purposes. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by executing processes in a peer-topeer 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 throughput of processes compared to centralized solutions. This papers describes our prototype system OSIRIS, which implements such a true peer--to--peer process execution. We further present very promising results verifying the advantages over centralized process management in terms of scalability. 1