AI-0614a: Steven Newhouse will check whether Windows Workflow can also be used with CCS / BES style services

In under two days I was able to (from scratch) build some custom workflow activities to transfer files to/from a server over FTP and to use the HPCP web service to run a job on a cluster resource. This time also included gaining familiarity with the Visual Studio IDE, the Workflow builder components within that, oh and gaining familiarity with C#. From a developer perspective I’m obviously quite impressed!

I did not really explore all of the different workflow activities that come provided (parallel, if/else, while, etc.) but the ones I did all seemed fairly straightforward to use. Its straightforward to give an activity properties and to specify these as customizations within a workflow. This allowed me to move a file from my workflow client to the HPC resource, to start a job on the resource, and to transfer back an output file. There are opportunities for simplifying this… e.g. parsing the JSDL file to extract out the transfer ins & outs. And to make the workflow more complex!

There’s a whole load of stuff on validation, hibernating/dehibernating running workflows, persistence, etc. that I did not explore.

With a set of pre-defined configurable activities I see no reason why a technically competent person (not a programmer) could not use a preconfigured environment to build and run their own workflows.

Steven

PS: I am sure there are other equally excellent ways of doing this in other environments… my focus was on the Windows tooling.