Workflow Management Research Group WFM_RG
General Information
Chairs:
Ewa Deelman, deelman@isi.edu
(home page)
Ian Taylor, Ian.J.Taylor@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
(home page)
Miron Livny, miron@cs.wisc.edu
(home page)
Focus/Purpose: The purpose of this group is to explore,
evaluate and propose workflow representation and mapping techniques that enable
the high-level description of application workflows and their execution in the
Grid environment. An area of emphasis will be on scientific workflows, which
describe the behavior of complex applications.
We will investigate workflow issues as they pertain to the entire
workflow lifecycle, starting from the reuse of generic idioms for composing
groups of tasks, to the tracking of the progress of a complex task or workflow
from the initial formulation of desired end tasks or data products through to
execution, including refinement and repair.
The group
will aim to work closely with other areas and groups within the GGF such as:
Distributed
Resource Management Application API (DRMAA-WG), Data Access and Integration
Services (DAIS-WG), Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA-WG), Semantic Grid
(SEM-RG), and Advanced Programming Models (APM-RG).
Additionally the group will follow the developments
in other industry and research bodies, such as the W3C.
Scope: Workflows today play a very important role
in the scientific and business communities. Applications today are not
monolithic entities, rather complex workflows that need to be realized in a
given environment. The Grid, as an workflow execution
environment is very complex because of its dynamic and heterogeneous nature.
The workflow management research group will focus on a variety of aspects of
workflow management in the Grid environment. We will identify existing
technologies as well as open issues that pertain to the entire workflow
lifecycle.
Although one focus
of the group is on scientific workflows, business workflows are also within the
scope.
Where appropriate,
the research group may spin off working groups.
Proposed
tasks:
Goals:
The goal of the
group is to foster the exchange of ideas, to explore various aspects of
workflow management in Grids. As such we propose to a series of topical
discussions and presentations and to generate reports reflecting the issues
discussed during the meetings.
Produce the following documents:
Summary of the GGF 10 Workflow (GGF11)
Workflow Specification Languages and Tools
(GGF12)
Business and Science Workflows
in the Grid Environment.
(GGF13)
Workflow Management Research in Web Services
and Applicability to Grid Services (GGF 14)
Workflow Execution Systems in Grids (GGF 15)
Fault Management in Workflow Execution (GGF16)
Taxonomy of Workflow Issues and Systems(GGF 17)
Exit Strategy:
The ultimate goal
of this group is to construct a taxonomy of workflow
issues and systems. Given that workflow management is just beginning to be
addressed in Grids, this research group may extend beyond the 2 year limit.
Meetings
OGF 20, May 2007, Manchester UK
Levels of Grid Workflow Interoperability - Adrian Toth, University of Miskolc
Describes the work of the Workflow Management Consortium (WfMC.org) that are standardizing of workflows in a generic way - XPDL, Wf-XML/ASAP and UML design patterns. The presenter argues that these standards should be adopted by WFM-RG, in particular XPDL. XPDL is an abstract version of BPEL and lead to BPEL 1.0 Adoption of such a standard would take years however, so in the interim, a the gateway Grid service could be used, which translates between different Workflow languages.
Workflow Optimization and Sharing Using Performance Information - Omer Rana, Cardiff University
The presentation discusses levels of sharing: an abstract level - language/graph sharing and a concrete level - sharing common services. The presentation focusses on the latter, introducing the KNOOGLE project, a semantic service matchmaker, and the sharing of workflow provenance data.
Scheduling Data Intensive Workflows Onto Storage-Constrained Distributed Resources - Rizos Sakellariou, University of Manchester
The presentation discusses the Pegasus workflow system, and related projects such as Montage and SCEC, in terms of the trade-off between what you share, and possible optimizations in reducing workflow footprint. For example a full workflow may come with a lot of data and it might therefore be prudent to share just a subset. Likewise the annotation of a workflow according to whether certain data has been used or not or is still needed is discussed, offering the possibility of introducing nodes that remove data from the loop.
myExperiment - Social Software for Workflow Sharing - David De Roure, University of Southampton and OMII-UK
The presentation introduces the myExperiment project, and its relation to Web2.0 paradigms such as the building of people-centric communities and fast, adaptive development processes.
The WHIP Plugin for Workflow and Artefact Sharing - Andrew Harrison, Cardiff University
The presentation describes initial work on recently OMII commissioned project enabling the sharing of workflow representations, executables and resource between portals and client-side workflow enactment engines.
Shibboleth Protection and Management of Workflows - Richard Sinnott, National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow
The presentation describes research into the use of Shibboleth certificate attributes. These attributes offer more flexible and dynamic authorization capabilities across different institutional boundaries and VOs. Attributes can be scoped for fine grained control over user authorization.
A Workflow Mapping Mechanism for establishing Quality of Service Guarantees - Dimosthenis Kyriazis, Telecommunications Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens
The presentation describes a mechanism for mapping Quality of Service parameters onto concrete workflow instances. The QoS parameters are combined with an abstract workflow description and concrete services are selected for the enactment based on the output of the mapping algorithm described in the presentation. The component that performs the mapping is implemented as a Web service.
GGF9, October 2003, Chicago
Minutes from the BOF, October 2003.
Presentations at the BOF:
Ewa Deelman:
Workflow Management
Marian Bubak (CrossGrid
Project) Grid Application Workflow
Composition
Anthony Mayer (
Ewa Deelman: General Discussion Slides
GGF10, March 2004,
Workflow in Grid Systems Workshop
Minutes from Ad-Hoc Meeting, GGG10, March 2004:
l
Minutes by
Rosa Badia
Minutes by Edward Walker
Presentations:
Ewa Deelman, Introduction
Alek Slominski, Update from the world of BPEL
Andreas Hoheisel, Workflow Specification in the Fraunhofer Resource Grid
Thomas Fahringer, Specifying and Representing Grid Workflow Applications with Teuta: a UML based approach
Gregor Von Laszewski, Workflow Specification in GridAnt
Presentations:
Ewa Deelman: Introduction and Discussion Items
Darren Pulsipher, Cadence "Workflow scripting language for grid computing"
Steve Mock, SDSC "SDSC Informnet: Grid Service based Workflow"
Luc Moreau, U. of South Hampton, "Towards iterators in the Virtual Data Language."
Yolanda Gil, USC, "Interactive
Composition of Scientific Workflows“
Minutes from the first session, by Andreas Hoheisel
Minutes from the second session, by Bill Nitzberg, summarized by Jim BlythePresentations:
Jim Blythe: Introduction, workflow scheduling and discussion items
Carole Goble, University of Manchester "Building ad hoc (personal) workflows in an open world: myGrid experiences"
Darren Pulsipher, Cadence "A look at industry workflows"
Thomas Soddemann, RZG, "The MiGenAS Workflow Engine"
GGF 15, October 2005, Boston
Presentations
Ewa
Deelman (USC/ISI) : Introduction
Dennis Gannon (Indiana University), Workflow for service
oriented computing in LEAD
Ivona Brandic (University of Vienna)
QoS-aware Grid Workflow Language and Execution Engine
based on Web Service Technology
Cesare Pautasso, (ETH Zurich) Modeling
and Executing Heterogeneous Grid Workflows with JOpera
R
Scientific Workflow Projects: http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/swf-survey/
NeSC workshop on e-Science Workflow Services: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=303
The Grid Computing Environment Research Group: http://www.gridforum.org/7_APM/GCE.htm
CAT (Composition Analysis Tool) http://www.isi.edu/ikcap/cat/: an ontology-based, mixed-initiative intelligent interface for Web service workflow composition.
Chimera: http://www.griphyn.org/chimera: a workflow composition and provenance tracking system.
The Pegasus project: http://pegasus.isi.edu (Planning for Execution in Grids): maps abstract workflow descriptions to an executable workflow.