Accelerating the Scientific Exploration Process with Scientific Workflows

Authors: I. Altintas, O. Barney, Z. Cheng, T. Critchlow, B. Ludaescher, S. Parker, A. Shoshani, M. Vouk - U. of Utah, etc.

Complete Citation

• I. Altintas, O. Barney, Z. Cheng, T. Critchlow, B. Ludaescher, S. Parker, A. Shoshani, M. Vouk. Accelerating the Scientific Exploration Process with Scientific Workflows. J. Physics: Conference Series, 46, 2006.

Abstract

Although an increasing amount of middleware has emerged in the last few years to achieve remote data access, distributed job execution, and data management, orchestrating these technologies with minimal overhead still remains a difficult task for scientists. Scientific workflow systems improve this situation by creating interfaces to a variety of technologies and automating the execution and monitoring of the workflows. Workflow systems provide domain-independent customizable interfaces and tools that combine different tools and technologies along with efficient methods for using them. As simulations and experiments move into the petascale regime, the orchestration of long running data and compute intensive tasks is becoming a major requirement for the successful steering and completion of scientific investigations.

Annotations

The authors describe scientific data management difficulties and solutions using workflow systems. "Scientific workflow systems improve this situation by creating interfaces to a variety of technologies and automating the execution and monitoring of the workflows." They highlight their system: Kepler.

Kepler builds atop Ptolemy II, a system for hierarchical, agent-based composition of software systems. Kepler has:

• A provenance framework and archiving system.
• An authentication framework (GSI).
• Runtime I/O services. Emphasis on interprocess communication (GriddLeS? ).
• A portal providing a job control user interface.

Tags: Workflow, Kepler, Provenance.

Related Work

• SCIrun Project: Pre-grid problem solving environment (PSE).
• ECCE Project: Another PSE.

-- JustinWozniak - 11 Jul 2007