Execution of service workflows in grid environments

Grid computing has emerged as a powerful environment for parallel processing. Nowadays, many organizations participate in one or more grid computing infrastructures, sharing computational resources to achieve high computational power and/or very large storage capacities. Mostly, these grids provide application interfaces for the user to submit jobs or workflows. These interfaces receive the submissions and distribute them among the grid resources. In this paper we evaluate a service-oriented grid testbed. Jobs are submitted through a workflow manager using a workflow composition language which allows services to be invoked sequentially or in parallel. Experimental results show that the overhead when using a service composition scheme does not prevent the grid from giving fast workflow execution. In our testbed, for a median filter application, we were able to get executions in the order of five times faster using the grid when compared to the local execution.