CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: Infrastructure for Enabling Systematic Development and Research of Scientific Workflow Management Systems

科学工作流程几乎普遍应用于研究和工程学科，并为过去几十年中一些最重大的发现奠定了基础(例如，首次探测到来自碰撞黑洞的引力波，发现了希格斯玻色子，以及探测到了奇异的核衰变)。工作流管理系统(WMS)是提供抽象和自动化以促进对分布式和异类计算和存储资源的访问和管理的软件系统。它们使广泛的研究人员能够轻松地定义复杂的计算过程，然后在并行和分布式计算平台上高效地执行它们。不幸的是，尽管工作流被广泛采用，但由于存在数十个看似可比但却不兼容的系统，技术版图被分割开来，并构成了巨大的进入壁垒。研究领域也是不连续的，这使得比较和对比方法、核实和复制结果以及在现有工作的基础上再接再厉变得困难。该项目将与工作流界的代表接触-包括研究人员、开发人员、科学和工程用户以及网络基础设施专家。通过有针对性的社区调查和有重点的研讨会，该项目将收集一系列不同的观点，创建社区拥有的WMS清单和共同知识分类，定义衡量WMS能力的实验方法，并为社区研究基础设施制定蓝图。这一拟议的基础设施有可能真正实现工作流研究的民主化，使研究人员、博士后和学生能够访问尖端基础设施，以便对工作流研究结果进行比较、评估和验证。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scientific workflows are used almost universally across research and engineering disciplines and have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the past several decades (e.g., first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the detection of an exotic nuclear decay). Workflow management systems (WMSs) are software systems that provide abstraction and automation for facilitating access to and management of distributed and heterogeneous compute and storage resources. They enable a broad range of researchers to easily define sophisticated computational processes and to then execute them efficiently on parallel and distributed computing platforms. Unfortunately, in spite of widespread adoption of workflows, the technology landscape is segmented and presents significant barriers to entry due to the existence of dozens of seemingly comparable, yet incompatible, systems. The research landscape is also disjoint, making it difficult to compare and contrast approaches, verify and reproduce results, and build upon existing work.This project will engage with representatives from the workflows community – including researchers, developers, science and engineering users, and cyberinfrastructure experts. Through targeted community surveys and focused workshops, the project will gather a diverse set of perspectives, create a community-owned WMS inventory and common knowledge taxonomy, define an experimental methodology for measuring WMS capabilities, and develop a blueprint for a community research infrastructure. This proposed infrastructure has the potential to truly democratize workflows research, enabling researchers, postdocs, and students, irrespective of their institutions, to access cutting-edge infrastructure for comparison, evaluation, and verification of workflows research results.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.