A novel approach to user-steering in scientific workflows

From the scientist's perspective the workflow execution is like black boxes. The scientist submits the workflow and at the end, the result or a notification about failed completion is returned. Concerning long running experiments or when workflows are in experimental phase it may not be acceptable. Scientist may need to fine-tune and monitor their experiments. To support the scientist with special user interaction tool we introduced intervention points (iPoints) where the user takes over the control for a while and has the possibility to interfere, namely to change some parameters or data, or to stop, to restart the workflow or even to deviate from the original workflow model during enactment. We plan to implement our solution in IWIR \cite{plan2011} language which was targeted to provide interoperability between four existing well-known SWfMS within the framework of the SHIWA project

A NOVEL ADAPTIVE CHECKPOINTING METHOD BASED ON INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM WORKFLOW STRUCTURE

Scientific workflows are data- and compute-intensive; thus, they may run for days or even weeks on parallel and distributed infrastructures such as grids, supercomputers, and clouds. In these high-performance computing infrastructures, the number of failures that can arise during scientific-workflow enactment can be high, so the use of fault-tolerance techniques is unavoidable. The most-frequently used fault-tolerance technique is taking checkpoints from time to time; when failure is detected, the last consistent state is restored. One of the most-critical factors that has great impact on the effectiveness of the checkpointing method is the checkpointing interval. In this work, we propose a Static (Wsb) and an Adaptive (AWsb) Workflow Structure Based checkpointing algorithm. Our results showed that, compared to the optimal checkpointing strategy, the static algorithm may decrease the checkpointing overhead by as much as 33% without affecting the total processing time of workflow execution. The adaptive algorithm may further decrease this overhead while keeping the overall processing time at its necessary minimum

Usability of Scientific Workflow in Dynamically Changing Environment

Scientific workflow management systems are mainly data-flow oriented, which face several challenges due to the huge amount of data and the required computational capacity which cannot be predicted before enactment. Other problems may arise due to the dynamic access of the data storages or other data sources and the distributed nature of the scientific workflow computational infrastructures (cloud, cluster, grid, HPC), which status may change even during running of a single workflow instance. Many of these failures could be avoided with workflow management systems that provide provenance based dynamism and adaptivity to the unforeseen scenarios arising during enactment. In our work we summarize and categorize the failures that can arise in cloud environment during enactment and show the possibility of prediction and avoidance of failures with dynamic and provenance support

A NOVEL ADAPTIVE CHECKPOINTING METHOD BASED ON INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM WORKFLOW STRUCTURE

Scientific workflows are data- and compute-intensive; thus, they may run for days or even weeks on parallel and distributed infrastructures such as grids, supercomputers, and clouds. In these high-performance computing infrastructures, the number of failures that can arise during scientific-workflow enactment can be high, so the use of fault-tolerance techniques is unavoidable. The most-frequently used fault-tolerance technique is taking checkpoints from time to time; when failure is detected, the last consistent state is restored. One of the most-critical factors that has great impact on the effectiveness of the checkpointing method is the checkpointing interval. In this work, we propose a Static (Wsb) and an Adaptive (AWsb) Workflow Structure Based checkpointing algorithm. Our results showed that, compared to the optimal checkpointing strategy, the static algorithm may decrease the checkpointing overhead by as much as 33% without affecting the total processing time of workflow execution. The adaptive algorithm may further decrease this overhead while keeping the overall processing time at its necessary minimum