A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Locality-aware scientific workflow engine for fast-evolving spatiotemporal sensor data, A

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Discerning knowledge from voluminous data involves a series of data manipulation steps. Scientists typically compose and execute workflows for these steps using scientific workflow management systems (SWfMSs). SWfMSs have been developed for several research communities including but not limited to bioinformatics, biology, astronomy, computational science, and physics. Parallel execution of workflows has been widely employed in SWfMSs by exploiting the storage and computing resources of grid and cloud services. However, none of these systems have been tailored for the needs of spatiotemporal analytics on real-time sensor data with high arrival rates. This thesis demonstrates the development and evaluation of a target-oriented workflow model that enables a user to specify dependencies among the workflow components, including data availability. The underlying spatiotemporal data dispersion and indexing scheme provides fast data search and retrieval to plan and execute computations comprising the workflow. This work includes a scheduling algorithm that targets minimizing data movement across machines while ensuring fair and efficient resource allocation among multiple users. The study includes empirical evaluations performed on the Google cloud

BioWorkbench: A High-Performance Framework for Managing and Analyzing Bioinformatics Experiments

Advances in sequencing techniques have led to exponential growth in biological data, demanding the development of large-scale bioinformatics experiments. Because these experiments are computation- and data-intensive, they require high-performance computing (HPC) techniques and can benefit from specialized technologies such as Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) and databases. In this work, we present BioWorkbench, a framework for managing and analyzing bioinformatics experiments. This framework automatically collects provenance data, including both performance data from workflow execution and data from the scientific domain of the workflow application. Provenance data can be analyzed through a web application that abstracts a set of queries to the provenance database, simplifying access to provenance information. We evaluate BioWorkbench using three case studies: SwiftPhylo, a phylogenetic tree assembly workflow; SwiftGECKO, a comparative genomics workflow; and RASflow, a RASopathy analysis workflow. We analyze each workflow from both computational and scientific domain perspectives, by using queries to a provenance and annotation database. Some of these queries are available as a pre-built feature of the BioWorkbench web application. Through the provenance data, we show that the framework is scalable and achieves high-performance, reducing up to 98% of the case studies execution time. We also show how the application of machine learning techniques can enrich the analysis process

Meteorological Applications utilizing Grid and Cloud Computing

Three practical meteorological applications with different characteristics are used to highlight the usability of a computer science workflow middleware called ASKALON by allowing easy access to distributed computing for atmospheric scientists. Utilizing Cloud and Grid computing, this paper shows use case scenarios fitting a wide range of applications from operational to research studies with real world examples from meteorological research. The paper concludes that distributed computing is easily usable for meteorological problems using ASKALON. This powerful tool allows simple and cost effective access to computing capacity from Grid and Cloud environments.(VLID)2218663Submitted versio

A characterization of workflow management systems for extreme-scale applications

Automation of the execution of computational tasks is at the heart of improving scientific productivity. Over the last years, scientific workflows have been established as an important abstraction that captures data processing and computation of large and complex scientific applications. By allowing scientists to model and express entire data processing steps and their dependencies, workflow management systems relieve scientists from the details of an application and manage its execution on a computational infrastructure. As the resource requirements of today’s computational and data science applications that process vast amounts of data keep increasing, there is a compelling case for a new generation of advances in high-performance computing, commonly termed as extreme-scale computing, which will bring forth multiple challenges for the design of workflow applications and management systems. This paper presents a novel characterization of workflow management systems using features commonly associated with extreme-scale computing applications. We classify 15 popular workflow management systems in terms of workflow execution models, heterogeneous computing environments, and data access methods. The paper also surveys workflow applications and identifies gaps for future research on the road to extreme-scale workflows and management systems