AGWL

Abstract Grid Workflow Language

from a paper of Fahringer et al, 2005:

Currently Grid application developers often configure available application components into a workflow of tasks that they can submit for executing on the Grid. In this paper, we present an Abstract Grid Workflow Language (AGWL) for describing Grid workflow applications at a high level of abstraction. AGWL has been designed such that the user can concentrate on specifying scientific applications without dealing with either the complexity of the Grid or any specific implementation technology such as Web/Grid services, software components or Java classes. AGWL is an XML-based language which allows a programmer to define a graph of activities that refer to computational tasks or user interactions. Activities are connected by control and data flow links. A rich set of constructs is provided to simplify the specification of Grid workflow applications which includes basic control flow constructs such as if, foreach and while loops as well as advanced control flow constructs including parallel sections, parallel loops and collection iterators. Moreover, AGWL supports a generic high level access mechanism to data repositories. AGWL is the main interface to the ASKALON Grid application development environment and has been applied to numerous real world applications. We demonstrate one example of a material science workflow that has been successfully ported to a Grid infrastructure based on an AGWL specification.

http://dps.uibk.ac.at/projects/agwl/