Below is the information about the panel to be conducted during WORKS06
(Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science) in
Paris in conjunction with HPDC.
Panel
on “Workflow as the Methodology of Science”
Tuesday June 20 2006
WORKS Workshop
HPDC
Moderator Geoffrey
Fox
A recent NSF workshop http://vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
proposed that workflow could be viewed as underlying support for the
scientific methodology emerging in many fields and involving distributed
interdisciplinary data deluged scientific methodology as an end (instrument,
conjecture) to end (publication, archived results) process. This vision for workflow
mixes the coupled execution of related services characteristic of most
scientific workflow with the more asynchronous longer term processes familiar
in some business workflow. Can one usefully link these different styles of
workflow and further enhance scientific productivity?
One challenge is reproducibility
of this full process which is core to the scientific method and requires rich
provenance, interoperable persistent repositories with linkage of open data and
publication as well as distributed simulations, data analysis and new
algorithms. The distributed reproducible science methodology can be supported
by publishing all steps in a sort of electronic logbook that is the “script”
of the full scientific workflow. It would need to capture the scientific
process (data analysis) as a rich cloud of resources including emails, presentations,
wikis as well as databases, compiler options, build time/runtime configurations
etc. One could need to separate wheat from chaff in this electronic record
(logbook) keeping only that required to make process reproducible and allowing
selective execution (checking) of components of the log.
Is this a reasonable
picture for a future workflow requirement and what are the new research
challenges it engenders?
The presentations at NSF meeting
can be found at http://vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki/index.php/Documents
and give us a starting point!
Contributors:
E. Deelman Summary
of NSF Workshop
S. Jha Application
perspective
D. De Roure Provenance
I. Foster Lessons
from current Science Grids
TBD Web
service and business workflow
Ewa Deelman,
PhD
Research Assistant Professor, USC Computer Science Department
Research Team Leader, Center for Grid Technologies
USC Information Sciences Institute
Marina
Del Rey, CA
90292
(310)
448-8408
http://www.isi.edu/~deelman