III/EAGER: Towards Workflows as First-Class Citizens in Cyberinfrastructure: Designing Shared Repositories

随着用于计算实验的网络基础设施的到来，科学计算进入了一个规模和共享的新时代。一个关键的新兴概念是科学工作流，它为科学应用程序提供了一种声明性表示，即软件组件及其之间的数据流的复杂组合。工作流系统管理它们在分布式资源中的执行，跟踪分析产品的出处，并实现结果的快速重现性。在当前的网络基础设施中，有一些众所周知的共享数据、仪器和计算资源的机制。尽管科学界正在兴起一场共享分析过程的运动，但共享工作流的情况并非如此。这个项目探索了共享工作流的计算机制，作为科学研究的网络基础设施的一个关键缺失元素，主要有三个研究重点：(1)引出工作流共享对共享软件工具和库的现有技术提出的新要求；(2)了解应如何设计共享工作流目录，因为现有的数据目录是一个成功的模型，并且软件组件需要不同的表示和访问功能；以及(3)研究什么共享范例可能适合于科学界。这项工作的预期结果包括：推动这一研究领域的工作流共享和重用的用例，软件重用和工作流重用需求之间的比较，定义预期功能和服务的工作流目录规范，以及在科学界建立这种新型共享资源时出现的社会问题的调查。结果可在项目网站(http://workflow-sharing.isi.edu).)上查阅

Scientific computing has entered a new era of scale and sharing with the arrival of cyberinfrastructure for computational experimentation. A key emerging concept is scientific workflows, which provide a declarative representation of scientific applications as complex compositions of software components and the dataflow among them. Workflow systems manage their execution in distributed resources, track provenance of analysis products, and enable rapid reproducibility of results. In current cyberinfrastructure, there are well-understood mechanisms for sharing data, instruments, and computing resources. This is not the case for sharing workflows, though there is an emerging movement for sharing analysis processes in the scientific community.This project explores computational mechanisms for sharing workflows as a key missing element of cyberinfrastructure for scientific research, with three major research foci: (1) Elicitation of new requirements that workflow sharing poses over current techniques to share software tools and libraries; (2) Understanding how shared workflow catalogs should be designed, as the existing data catalogs are a successful model, and software components require different representations and access functions; and (3) Studying what sharing paradigms might be appropriate for scientific communities. Expected results from this work include: use cases for workflow sharing and reuse that motivate this research area, a comparison between software reuse and workflow reuse requirements, a specification of a workflow catalog defining expected functions and services, and an investigation of social issues that arise in building this new kind of shared resource in scientific communities. Results are available at the project Web site (http://workflow-sharing.isi.edu).