NSF Workshop on Scientific Workflows Challenges (WSW-06)

工作流程最近已经成为进行大规模科学分析的范例。工作流的结构指定了需要执行哪些分析例程、它们之间的数据流以及相关的执行细节。 这些工作流通常需要在分布式环境中执行，其中数据源可能在不同的物理位置可用，并且步骤可能具有需要远程位置处的高端计算和存储器资源的执行要求。 工作流有助于管理相关任务的协调执行。 它们还提供了一种系统的方式来获取科学方法，并为其结果提供出处信息。然而，健壮和灵活的工作流创建、映射和执行在很大程度上是开放的研究问题，科学工作流对业务工作流和其他类型的过程模型提出了新的挑战。 它们通常使用非常大的分布式数据集，采用计算密集型任务，并需要高端和分布式计算技术。 它们也经常是迭代和交互式设计的，因为这是它们所反映的科学探索和分析过程的性质。 另一方面，科学工作流在数据流结构、执行管理或安全/隐私约束方面也有简化的要求。目前，科学工作流程大多没有正式的原则，很少被优化，可扩展或可重用。本次研讨会的目的是汇集IT研究人员和从业人员以及领域科学家。应用科学家将被要求描述需求和所需的新分析和计算，这是不可能与今天的技术。 信息技术研究人员将被要求在他们的专业知识的特定领域确定问题。讨论将侧重于四个主要专题：（1）应用和要求;（2）动态工作流程和用户指导;（3）数据和工作流程说明;（4）支持大规模工作流程的系统级管理。研讨会的成果将是一份报告，概述研究方向和活动，将使所需的社区共同努力，为科学工作流程创造一个新的范例。用于构建高效、可扩展和可重复使用的科学工作流程的易于使用的工具可能会为许多领域带来好处，并可以提高许多领域研究工作的速度和质量。讲习班网址（http：//vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki）提供关于讲习班的进一步资料，并将用于传播讲习班报告和其他成果。

Workflows have recently emerged as a paradigm for conducting large-scale scientific analyses. The structure of a workflow specifies what analysis routines need to be executed, the data flow amongst them, and relevant execution details. These workflows often need to be executed in distributed environments, where data sources may be available in different physical locations and the steps may have execution requirements calling for high-end computing and memory resources at remote locations. Workflows help manage the coordinated execution of related tasks. They also provide a systematic way to capture scientific methodology and provide provenance information for their results. Yet, robust and flexible workflow creation, mapping, and execution are largely open research problems.Scientific workflows present new challenges over business workflows and other kinds of process models. They typically use very large, distributed data sets, employ computationally intensive tasks, and require high-end and distributed computing technology. They are also often iteratively and interactively designed, since that is the nature of the scientific exploration and analysis process they reflect. On the other hand, scientific workflows also have simplified requirements in terms of their data flow structure, execution management, or security/privacy constraints. Currently, scientific workflows are mostly designed without formal principles and are rarely optimized, scalable or reusable.The aim of this workshop is to bring together IT researchers and practitioners as well as domain scientists. Application scientists will be asked to describe requirements and desired new analyses and computations that are not possible with today's technologies. IT researchers will be asked to identify problems in their specific areas of expertise. Discussions will focus on four main topics: (1) applications and requirements; (2) dynamic workflows and user steering; (3) data and workflow descriptions; and (4) system-level management to support large-scale workflows. The outcome of the workshop will be a report outlining research directions and activities that will bring the needed communities together to work on producing a new paradigm for scientific workflows. Easy-to-use tools for building efficient, scalable and reusable scientific workflows are likely to bring benefits to many fields, and can raise the pace and quality of research work in many areas. The workshop Web site (http://vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki) provides further information about the workshop and will be used for disseminating the workshop report and other results.