This monograph addresses four critical software development aspects for the engineering and execution of applications on parallel and Grid architectures.

A new directive-based language called ZEN is proposed for compact specification of wide value ranges of interest for arbitrary application parameters. The monograph contributes to various research areas related to integrated tool development for efficient engineering and high performance execution of scientific applications in Grid environments.

Presenting a cutting-edge workflow language explicitly expressing parallelism and data distribution for generic workflow applications, this book includes sophisticated algorithms for automatically creating and optimizing workflows using semantic technologies.

Creating scientific workflow applications is a very challenging task due to the complexity of the distributed computing environments involved, the complex control and data flow requirements of scientific applications, and the lack of high-level languages and tools support. Particularly, sophisticated expertise in distributed computing is commonly required to determine the software entities to perform computations of workflow tasks, the computers on which workflow tasks are to be executed, the actual execution order of workflow tasks, and the data transfer between them. Qin and Fahringer...