Workflow

About: Workflow is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 31996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 498339 citations.

Advanced Topics In Workflow Management: Issues, Requirements, And Solutions

Abstract: This paper surveys and investigates the strengths and weaknesses of a number of recent approaches to advanced workflow modelling. Rather than inventing just another workflow language, we briefly describe recent workflow languages, and we analyse them with respect to their support for advanced workflow topics. Object Coordination Nets, Workflow Graphs, WorkFlow Nets, and an approach based on Workflow Evolution are described as dedicated workflow modelling approaches. In addition, the Unified Modelling Language as the de facto standard in object-oriented modelling is also investigated. These approaches are discussed with respect to coverage of workflow perspectives and support for flexibility and analysis issues in workflow management, which are today seen as two major areas for advanced workflow support. Given the different goals and backgrounds of the approaches mentioned, it is not surprising that each approach has its specific strengths and weaknesses. We clearly identify these strengths and weaknesses, and we conclude with ideas for combining their best features.

Integrating Containers into Workflows: A Case Study Using Makeflow, Work Queue, and Docker

Abstract: Workflows are a widely used abstraction for representing large scientific applications and executing them on distributed systems such as clusters, clouds, and grids. However, workflow systems have been largely silent on the question of precisely what environment each task in the workflow is expected to run in. As a result, a workflow may run correctly in the environment in which it was designed, but when moved to another machine, is highly likely to fail due to differences in the operating system, installed applications, available data, and so forth. Lightweight container technology has recently arisen as a potential solution to this problem, by providing a well-defined execution environments at the operating system level. In this paper, we consider how to best integrate container technology into an existing workflow system, using Makeflow, Work Queue, and Docker as examples of current technology. A brief performance study of Docker shows very little overhead in CPU and I/O performance, but significant costs in creating and deleting containers. Taking this into account, we describe four different methods of connecting containers to different points of the infrastructure, and explain several methods of managing the container images that must be distributed to executing tasks. We explore the performance of a large bioinformatics workload on a Docker-enabled cluster, and observe the best configuration to be locally-managed containers that are shared between multiple tasks.

Hierarchical display and navigation of document revision histories

Abstract: A system and technique for displaying a document's workflow history are disclosed. The system includes a graphical user interface for displaying one or more graphical representations of events generated by an application configured to edit a document. Each of the events generated by the application may be stored in a data structure that is associated with one or more portions of the document. The data structure may also be associated with a digital image that reflects the state of the document at the time the event was generated and one or more frames of digital video captured substantially simultaneously with the generation of the event. The system may display the stored events via graphical representations in the graphical user interface that represent a portion of the total document workflow history. A user may navigate through the graphical events based on a hierarchical algorithm for clustering events.

P-GRADE portal family for grid infrastructures

Abstract: P-GRADE portal is one of the most widely used general-purpose grid portal in Europe. The paper summarizes the most advanced features of P-GRADE, such as parameter sweep workflow execution, multi-grid workflow execution and integration with the DSpace workflow repository. It also shows the NGS P-GRADE portal that extends P-GRADE with the GEMLCA legacy code execution support in Grid systems, as well as with coarse-grain workflow interoperability services. Next, the paper introduces the second generation P-GRADE portal called WS-PGRADE that merges the advanced features of the first generation P-GRADE portals and extends them with new workflow and architecture concepts. Finally, the application-specific science gateway of the CancerGrid project is briefly described to demonstrate that application-specific portals can easily be developed on top of the general-purpose WS-PGRADE portal. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.