Scientific Workflows and Business workflow standards in e-Science

An initiative of VL-e 

The workshop report

 

 

In conjunction with

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Dec 4-6, 2006
Amsterdam,

theNetherlands

Aims and scope

In e-Science environments, Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWMS) hide the integration details at different layers of middleware such as for managing Grid resources, computing tasks, data and information, and automate the management of experiment routines. The workshop focuses on practical aspects of utilising workflow techniques to fill the gap between the e-Science applications on one hand and the middleware (Grid) and the low level infrastructure on the other hand.Recently development in Grid technology have shown a convergence between business workflow standards such as BPEL4WS and scientific workflows and scientific workflow management systems: design, implementation, applications in all fields of computational science, interoperability among workflows and the e-Science infrastructure,

 e.g., knowledge framework, for workflow management. To achieve such a goal, in the context of the Virtual Laboratory for e-Science (VL-e) project concerted research is carried out along the complete e-Science technology chain, ranging from applications to networking, focusing on new methodologies and re-usable components. The mission of the VL-e project is to boost e-Science by creating an e-Science environment and carrying out research on methodologies.

The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers and developers inside and outside the VL-e communities in the field of workflow and e-Science applications to exchange the latest experience and research ideas on utilising workflow and business workflow standards in addressing challenging requirements in e-Science applications.

 

Program

The workshop invites well known  researchers in the domain of workflow systems from both academia and industry to present the last research outcome in using workflow systems and standards to tackle e-Science issues:

Workshop preliminary program

 

List of confirmed invited Speakers

  1. Dr. Ewa Deelman (Department of ComputerScienceUniversity of South California
  2. Dr. Dieter KonigSenior Technical Staff Member at IBM Germany Development Laboratory
  3. Dr. Bertram Ludascher(Department of ComputerScienceUniversity of California, Davis
  4. Prof. Peter Rice (European Bioinformatics Institute)
  5. Dr. Steve Ross-Talbot (CEO, and a co-founder, of Pi4 Technologies
  6. Dr. Ian J. Taylor (Department of Computer Science Cardiff University, UK and The Center for

Computation and Technology (CCT), Louisiana State University, USA

 Workshop program

 

 Tue, 05 Dec 2006

W21a:Maurits room) 11:30-13:00

 

11:30-12:00Ewa Deelman Meeting the Challenges of Managing Large-Scale Scientific Workflows in Distributed Environments,

 

AbstractIn this talk we discuss several challenges associated scientific workflow design and management in distributed, heterogeneous environments. Based on our prior work with a number of scientific applications, we describe the workflow lifecycle and examine our experiences and the challenges ahead as they pertain to the user experience, planning the workflow execution and managing the execution itself.

 

12:00-12:30 Bertram LudascherScientific Workflows: More e-Science Mileage from Cyberinfrastructure

 

AbstractWe view scientific workflows as the domain scientists way to harness cyberinfrastructure for e-Science. Domainscientists are often interested in end-to-end frameworks which include data acquisition, transformation, analysis,visualization, and other steps. While there is no lack of technologies and standards to choose from, a simple,unified framework combining data modeling and processorientedmodeling and design of scientific workflows has yet to emerge. Towards this end, we introduce a number of concepts such as models of computation and provenance,actor-oriented modeling, adapters, hybrid types, and higher-order components, and then outline a particularcomposition of some of these concepts, yielding a promising new synthesis for describing scientific workflows, i.e.,Collection-Oriented Modeling and Design (COMAD)

 

12:30-13:00J. TaylorTriana Generations

 

AbstractThis talk discusses the Triana workflow system withinthe context of the workflow community at large. It providesa brief background for Triana and discusses the ways inwhich is has been used in the past for serial and as-well-asdistributed tasks. A brief overview of other environmentsis given followed by a description of the Triana distributedarchitecture and a discussion of its key features, being: itsuser interface and its ability to work simultaneously in heterogeneousdistributed environments. The high-level Gridand service-based interfaces that enable this support areoutlined along with their corresponding bindings to the underlyingmiddleware, such as WSPeer, Jxta, P2PS, Globusand Web and WS-RF services. New directions are given forTriana within the peer-to-peer context, followed by a descriptionof two current uses for this technology and twocollaborations, which are providing distributed P2P simulationsto help test our P2P overlays for massively distributedprocessing and searching before deployment

 

W21b: (Maurits room)14:30 - 16:00

 

14:30-15:00P. Rice EMBRACE: Bioinformatics data and analysis tool services for e-Science

AbstractThe EMBRACE project is a network of European partners providing services which integrate the major data resources and analysis software tools using web services and emerging grid technologies. Prototype services are available for the core data resources and the most commonly used tools for sequence analysis. Data access uses the WSDbFetch and BioMart services from the European Bioinformatics Institute. Software tool services use the SoapLab services, also from the European Bioinformatics Institute. The preferred client for these services is Taverna from the myGrid project. Subprojects are collecting and analyzing biological use cases, and maintaining a watch on emerging grid technology in Europe

 

15:00-15:30 D. KonigWeb Services - Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0

 

Abstract BusinessProcessesnotonlyplaya key role in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios by exposingtheappropriateinvocationandinteraction patterns but they are the fundamentalbasisforbuildingheterogeneousanddistributed applications (workflow-based applications). Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) provides the language to specify business processes that are composed of Web services as well as exposed as Web services. Business Processes specified via WS-BPEL are portable and can be carried out by every WS-BPEL compliant execution environment. This presentation gives an overview of the WS-BPEL language and shows how it can be used to compose Web services. It provides highlights of WS-BPEL, including structured activities, correlation, compensation, and fault handling. Finally, the OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee work, the current status of the standard, and an outlook on follow-on activities is presented.

 

 

15:30 - 16:00P. Adriaans Workflow design and implementation issues in the VL-e project

 

Abstract The Mission of the VL-e project is to boost e-Science by creating an e-Science environment and carrying out research on methodologies. The strategy followed in the VL-e project is to carry out concerted research along the complete e-Science technology chain, ranging from applications to networking, focusing on new methodologies and re-usable components. This talk will focus on importance design and implementation issues of workflow management systems for the VL-e project

 

 

W21c: (Maurits room)16:30 - 18:10

 

16:30 - 17:00

 

17:00 - 18:10: Panel discussion

- Moderator: P. Adriaans /M. Bubak

- Participants: E. Deelman, D. Konig, B. Ludascher, P. Rice, S. Ross-Talbot, I.Taylor

 

 

 

 

Paper submission and publications

Invited speakers are asked to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not more than 8 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines: instructions.html. Authors should submit a PDF or PostScript (level 2) file that will print on a PostScript printer. Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted through the e-Science 2006 paper submission system. It is expected that the proceedings will be published by the IEEE CS Press, USA and will be made available online through the IEEE Digital Library.

Important dates

August 15, 2006 Full paper due.

September 20, 2006 Camera-ready paper due.

 

Programme committee

Prof. L.O Hertzberger(member of the VL-e directorate board, UvA

Prof. Geleyn Mayer(member of the VL-e directorate board, UvA).

Prof. Henri Bal(member of the VL e directorate, VU)

Dr. Cees de Laat (co-chair VL-e Integration Group, UvA).

Prof. Marian Bubak AGHUniversity of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

  

Organisers

Dr. Adam Belloum & Dr.Zhiming Zhao

email: a.s.z.belloum@uva.nl,

   Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam 1098SJ, Amsterdam, the Netherlands