From WorkflowDesign

Contents 1 Workflow Design: Designing Scientific Applications One Workflow at a Time 1.1 What is New? 1.2 Publications 1.3 Points of Contact 1.4 Collaborators 1.5 Funding

Workflow Design: Designing Scientific Applications One Workflow at a Time

Much of science today relies on software to make new discoveries. This software embodies scientific analyses that are frequently composed of several application components and created collaboratively by different researchers. Computational workflows have recently emerged as a paradigm to manage these large-scale and large-scope scientific analyses. Workflows represent computations that are often executed in geographically distributed settings, their interdependencies, their requirements and their data products. In our view, the design of these workflows is at the core of the scientific discovery process and must be treated as scientific products in their own right.

The focus of this research is to develop the foundations for a science of design of scientific processes embodied in the new software artifact that is the computational workflow. The work will integrate best practices and lessons learned in existing workflow applications, and extend them in order to define and formalize design principles of computational workflows. This research will result in a fundamentally new approach to designing workflows that will greatly improve the scientific software design methodology by defining and formalizing design principles, and by familiarizing the scientific community with these effective workflow design processes.

What is a workflow?
* An introductory book
* An introductory tutorial
* Some introductory papers

What is New?

We have explored four major research areas to date:

1. Capabilities of current workflow systems and benefits of using semantics for workflow descriptions
2. Repository of workflow exemplars that capture commonly occurring workflow structures
3. Comparison of workflows with other programming paradigms
4. Investigation of desirable properties of workflows

Publications

• "From Data to Knowledge to Discoveries: Scientific Workflows and Artificial Intelligence". Yolanda Gil. To appear in Scientific Programming, 2009. Available as a preprint.
• "Scientific Software as Workflows: From Discovery to Distribution". David Woollard, Nenad Medvidovic, Yolanda Gil, and Chris Mattmann. IEEE Software, Special Issue on Developing Scientific Software, July/August 2008. Available from the publisher.
• "Self-Configuring Applications for Heterogeneous Systems: Program Composition and Optimization Using Cognitive Techniques". Mary Hall, Yolanda Gil, and Robert Lucas. Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Cutting-Edge Computing: Using New Commodity Architectures, Volume 96, Issue 5, May 2008. Available from the publisher and as a preprint.
• "Principles for Interactive Acquisition and Validation of Workflows." Yolanda Gil, Jihie Kim, and Marc Spraragen. To appear in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2009. Available as a preprint.

Points of Contact

Yolanda Gil (co-PI) and Ewa Deelman (co-PI)

Collaborators

• Gonzalo Florez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Pedro Gonzalez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Mary Hall, University of Utah
• Chris Mattmann, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Nenad Medvidovic, University of Southern California
• David Woollard, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Funding

This work was done under the grant Designing Scientific Software One Workflow at a Time, funded by the National Science Foundation with grant number CCF-0725332 from October 2007 to September 2010.