A general and scalable solution for heterogeneous workflow invocation and nesting

Several widely utilized, grid workflow management systems emerged in the last decade. These systems were developed by different scientific communities for various purposes. Enhancing these systems with the capability of invoking and nesting the workflows of other systems within their native workflows makes these communities to be able to carry out cross-organizational experiments and share non-native workflows. The novel solution described in this paper allows the integration of different workflow engines and makes them accessible for workflow systems in order to achieve this goal. The solution is based on an application repository and submitter, which exposes different workflow engines and executes them using the computational resources of the grid. In contrast with other approaches, our solution is scalable in terms of both number of workflows and amount of data, easily extendable in the sense that the integration of a new workflow engine does not require code re-engineering, and general, since it can be adopted by numerous workflow systems.