Scientific workflow design for mere mortals

  • Authors:

  • Timothy McPhillips;Shawn Bowers;Daniel Zinn;Bertram Ludäscher

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA;University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA;University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA;University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA

  • Venue:
  • Future Generation Computer Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in research and development of scientific workflow systems. These systems promise to make scientists more productive by automating data-driven and compute-intensive analyses. Despite many early achievements, the long-term success of scientific workflow technology critically depends on making these systems useable by ''mere mortals'', i.e., scientists who have a very good idea of the analysis methods they wish to assemble, but who are neither software developers nor scripting-language experts. With these users in mind, we identify a set of desiderata for scientific workflow systems crucial for enabling scientists to model and design the workflows they wish to automate themselves. As a first step towards meeting these requirements, we also show how the collection-oriented modeling and design (comad) approach for scientific workflows, implemented within the Kepler system, can help provide these critical, design-oriented capabilities to scientists.