4th International Workshop on
Workflow Systems in e-Science

(WSES 09)

in conjunction with

9th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid

(http://staff.science.uva.nl/~zhiming/workshop/wses/,

 http://grid.sjtu.edu.cn/ccgrid2009/)

 May 2009, Shanghai, China

 (2008 | 2007 | 2006)

(New Submission deadline: December 21, 08)

 

Aims and scope

The development in Internet and Grid technologies has greatly enhanced the activities in scientific research; more and more new scientific advances are achieved by experiments which consist of complex sets of computations and large volumes of data. Workflow systems emerge as a key tool to integrate different computing and data analysis components, and to control the logic between computing tasks in experiments. During the past years, workflow systems attracted enormous research interests. Focusing on different aspects of workflow systems and applications, several workshops on scientific workflows have been organized, such as WORKS and SWF. And workflow systems have also been a main objective of a number of research projects: the Dutch Virtual Laboratory for e-Science (VL-e), and the EU funded Knowledge Workflow Grid (K-WfGrid) and the ViroLab project. Driven by specific applications, a large collection of workflow systems have been prototyped such as VLAM, Taverna and Pegasus. However, due to the diversity of the application domains and more importantly the increasing ambitions of scientists to extend the experiment scenarios, there is still a big gap between the functionality implemented in existing workflow systems and their usability in different application domains. The development of effective workflow systems still faces challenging issues like workflow sharing and discovery, provenance, human in the loop workflow execution, and workflow interoperability.

 

The workshop on Workflow Systems in e-Science (WSES) focuses on practical aspects of 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. The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers and developers in the field of e-Science to exchange the latest experience and research ideas on scientific workflow management and e-Science.

 

WSES09 is the fourth edition in the series of the workshop. The WSES08, WSES 07 and WSES 06 were successfully held in the context of CCGrid 2008, ICCS 2007 and 2006. A special session for WSES 07 will appear in the International Journal of Future Generations of Computer Systems (FGCS), and selected papers of WSES 06 have appeared in a special issue of Scientific Programming Journal.

Topics

 

Authors are invited to submit original manuscripts that demonstrate current research in all areas of scientific workflow management in e-Science. The workshop solicits novel papers on a broad range of topics:

  • Workflow modeling techniques
  • Workflow language
  • Workflow engines
  • Workflow interoperability
  • Semantic techniques in workflow
  • Dynamic workflow control
  • Workflow provenance
  • Web 2 in scientific workflow
  • Workflow verification and validation
  • AI techniques in workflow management, e.g., planning, runtime control and user support;
  • Security control in managing workflow
  • Real-world applications of scientific workflow

Paper submission and publication

The papers are limited to 6 pages each and they must follow the IEEE 8.5"x11" two-column format guidelines described at http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/cscps/cps/cps_forms.html. The papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. For accepted papers, advance registration is required in order to include the final camera ready version in the CCGrid 09 proceedings which will be published by IEEE Computer Society. And at least one author should be registered in advance and will present the paper in the workshop. The paper has to be submitted via online submission system.

 

 

Program

1.      14:00 - 16:00: (room 3) Session 1: Workflow technologies and applications

·        Hongxia Tong, An Agent-Based Approach for Adaptive Web Service Workflow Model

Web services are rapidly becoming popular as a vehicle for the design, integration, composition, and deployment of distributed and heterogeneous software. One of the most important values of employing Web
service is using the combination of Web services to create value added service. However, due to the lack of methodologies and tools, the development of Web services composition is still largely ad-hoc, timeconsuming
and requiring a considerable effort of lowlevel programming. An agent-based adaptive web service workflow model is presented in this paper to facilitate the dynamic Web service composition, which contains three layers. The top is the user layer which represents the service requirements as goal workflow, the bottom service layer denotes the distributed Web services, and the middle is the agent layer. Each service agent in the agent layer abstracts the features of a group of actual operations with similar functions as operation template and models the process of using operation templates to achieve a certain goal as plan. The distinguished feature of the current model is the introduction of the agent layer which can shield the heterogeneity of underling distributed Web services. Therefore, the common users only need to focus on what they want to achieve rather than how to achieve. Meanwhile, the agent-oriented technology facilitates the coordination at both intra- and intra-enterprise levels for web service composition. The proposed agent-based adaptive web service  workflow model provides a complete solution for dynamic and automatic service composition ranging from definition, vertical composition and horizontal composition.

·        Gregor von Laszewski, Cyberaide Shell: Interactive Task Management for Grids and Cyberinfrastructure

A steep learning curve and a high entry barrier limit the use of Grid computing and advanced cyberinfrastructure. These barriers become a significant issue to scientists which benefit from advanced cyberinfrastructure the most. In order for the scientists to focus on actual scientific tasks, specialized tools and services need to be developed to ease the integration of complex middleware. One such tool is Cyberaide Shell, an advanced but simple to use system shell which facilitates the use of current and future cyberinfrastructure. Cyberaide Shell is based on the integration of semantically enhanced commands and a dynamic interface that allows access to complex cyberinfrastructure in an easy and intuitive fashion on an ad-hoc basis. This is accomplished by abstracting the complexities of resource, task, workflow, and application management through a semantic command line interpreter. Through a service integration mechanism, the shell’s functionality is exposed to a wide variety of frameworks and programming languages. This includes client interfaces for Java, Ruby, Python, Matlab, R, JavaScript. We present our design and describe our use of the shell while integrating TeraGrid resources.

·        Yongjian Wang, Cesar-FD: An Effective Stateful Fault Detection Mechanism in Drug Discovery Grid

Workflow management system is widely accepted and used in the wide area network environment, especially in the e-Science application scenarios, to coordinate the operation of different functional components and to provide more powerful functions. The error-prone nature of the wide area network environment makes the fault-tolerance requirements of workflow management become more and more urgent. In this paper, we propose Cesar-FD, a stateful fault detection mechanism, which builds up states related to the runtime and external environments of workflow management system by aggregating multiple messages and provides more accurate notifications asynchronously. We demonstrate the use of this mechanism in the Drug Discovery Grid environment by two use cases. We also show that it can be used to detect faulty situations more accurately.

·        Ian Welch, Automating Malware Scanning using Workflows

Identifying websites hosting malicious code is a priority for helping protect consumers using the web and for the collection of malicious code for analysis by malware researchers. We have been running an InternetNZ sponsored study where homepages of almost all New Zealand Web servers are scanned on a regular basis by a set of client honeypots. This paper reflects upon our experience of running moderate scale scans over a period of several months manually and identifies some requirements for automation of such a system using workflow and related middleware.

2.      16:30 - 18:00: (room 3) Session 2: Demo and discussion

 

Important Dates

  • November 30, December 21, 2008 Full paper due
  • January 15, 21, 2009 Notification
  • February 15, 2008 Camera-ready paper due

Programme committee

  • Ilkay Altintas (University of California, USA)

·         Roger Barga (Microsoft Research, USA)

  • Marian Bubak (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland)
  • Ewa Deelman (University of Southern California, USA)
  • David De Roure (University of Southampton, UK)
  • Carole Goble  (University of Manchester, UK)
  • Bob Hertzberger (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
  • Andreas Hoheisel (Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology, Germany)
  • Lican Huang (Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, China)
  • Minglu Li (Shanghai Jiaotong University, China)
  • Shiyong Lu (Wayne State University, USA)
  • Syed Naqvi (CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK)
  • Ian Taylor (Cardiff University, UK)

Organisers

Dr. Zhiming Zhao
email: z.zhao@uva.nl

Tel: +31 20 5257599

Fax: +31 20 5257490

www: staff.science.uva.nl/~zhiming

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

 

Dr. Adam Belloum
email: A.S.Z.Belloum@uva.nl

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

 

Dr. Jian Cao
Email: cao-jian@cs.sjtu.edu.cn

Shanghai Jiaotong University

200030, Shanghai, P.R. China