It doesn't take a great deal of searching through the history of this blog to hear me harping about the need for mainstream Grid applications to accelerate all the technologies that we've come to know under the Grid umbrella.
I'll confess that I use the term application pretty loosely. It doesn't necessarily mean a single program but could be a series of programs or even simple scripts that tie together to form what is often called a workflow. Essentially any set of processes for getting real work done.
In the case of workflows the complexity of task management is added to by the complexities of data management for the effective sharing of data sets amongst the tasks of a workflow.
The folks over at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, a close relative of those that brought us the Globus Toolkit understand these complexities and have introduced Swift. Swift is an open source (naturally) software component that can be used to manage access to Grid services including those associated with the Globus Toolkit (again, naturally).
From the web site:
Swift is a system for the rapid and reliable specification, execution, and management of large-scale science and engineering workflows. It supports applications that execute many tasks coupled by disk-resident datasets - as is common, for example, when analyzing large quantities of data or performing parameter studies or ensemble simulations.
I'm going to keep an eye on this... I'm quite intrigued...
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