Call for Papers

The 4th Workshop on

Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science

 in conjunction with SC�09

Portland, OR

November 16, 2009

http://www.isi.edu/works09

In recent years workflows have emerged as a key technology that enables large-scale computations and service management on distributed resources. Workflows enable scientists to design complex analysis that are composed of individual application components or services. Often times these components and services are designed, developed, and tested collaboratively. The size of the data and the complexity of the analysis often lead to large amounts of shared resources, such as clusters and storage systems, being used to store the data sets and execute the workflows. The process of workflow design and execution in a distributed environment can be very complex and can involve multiple stages including their textual or graphical specification, the mapping of the high-level workflow descriptions onto the available resources, as well as monitoring and debugging of the subsequent execution.  Further, since computations and data access operations are performed on shared resources, there is an increased interest in managing the fair allocation and management of those resources at the workflow level.

Large-scale scientific applications pose several requirements on the workflow systems. Besides the magnitude of data processed by the workflow components, the resulting and intermediate data need to be annotated with provenance information and any other information needed to evaluate the quality of the data and support the repeatability of the analysis. Further, adequate workflow descriptions are needed to support the complex workflow management process which includes workflow creation, workflow reuse, and modifications made to the workflow over time—for example modifications to the individual workflow components. Additional workflow annotations may provide guidelines and requirements for resource mapping and execution.

The Fourth Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science focuses on the entire workflow lifecycle including the workflow composition, mapping, robust execution and the recording of provenance information.  The workshop also welcomes contributions in the applications area, where the requirements on the workflow management systems can be derived. Special attention will be paid to Bio-Computing applications which are the theme for SC09. The topics of the workshop include but are not limited to: