The Grid-WORM (Grid Workflow Online Resource Manager) is a novel architecture for workflow management in large-scale Grid environments. As the amount of workflow jobs increases in Grid environments the importance of providing sufficient support for these workflows rises too. The WORM approach provides such features needed to build advanced support for workflows in next generation large-scale Grid environments. Because, these next generation Grid environments consist of large amounts of different resources ranging from computing devices, such as parallel computers and network infrastructures, storage capacity, to human resources, centralized control instances can hardly be extended to support the large number of requests all the workflow jobs generate. So the complexity arising from these extensive composed workflows combined by requests for the distributed and diverse resources, often depending to different domains and organizations, turns up to overstrain any centralized approaches.

The WORM architecture provides automated, adaptive, and flexible allocation of arbitrary resources in a coordinated manner and does not require any centralized logic. As all of the local resources provide there own resource management system our focus is on the workflow execution and control. To have a reliable and extensible framework on which the WORM architecture can be based on, the active network technology (ANTS) was chosen.