An agent based planner for including network QoS in scientific workflows

Advanced network infrastructure plays an important role in the e-Science environment to provide high quality connections between largely distributed data sensors, and computing and storage elements. However, the quality of the network services has so far rarely been considered in composing and executing scientific workflows. Currently, scientific applications tune the execution quality of workflows neglecting network resources, and by selecting only optimal software services and computing resources. One reason is that IP-based networks provide few possibilities for workflow systems to manage the service quality, and limit or prevent bandwidth reservation or network paths selection. We see nonetheless a strong need from scientific applications, and network operators, to include the network quality management in the workflow systems.
Novel network infrastructures open up new possibilities in network tuning at the application level. In this position paper, we discuss our vision on this issue and propose an agent based solution to include network resources in the loop of workflow composition, scheduling and execution when advanced network services are available. We present the first prototype of our approach in the context of the CineGrid project.