A comparison of using Taverna and BPEL in building scientific workflows: the case of caGrid

Authors:
Wei Tan;Paolo Missier;Ian Foster;Ravi Madduri;David De Roure;Carole Goble
Affiliations:
Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, U.S.A.;School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K.;Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, U.S.A. and Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, U.S.A.;Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, U.S.A. and Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, U.S.A.;School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, U.K.;School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K.
Venue:
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience
Year:
2010

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Abstract

When the emergence of ‘service-oriented science,’ the need arises to orchestrate multiple services to facilitate scientific investigation—that is, to create ‘science workflows.’ We present here our findings in providing a workflow solution for the caGrid service-based grid infrastructure. We choose BPEL and Taverna as candidates, and compare their usability in the lifecycle of a scientific workflow, including workflow composition, execution, and result analysis. Our experience shows that BPEL as an imperative language offers a comprehensive set of modeling primitives for workflows of all flavors; whereas Taverna offers a dataflow model and a more compact set of primitives that facilitates dataflow modeling and pipelined execution. We hope that this comparison study not only helps researchers to select a language or tool that meets their specific needs, but also offers some insight into how a workflow language and tool can fulfill the requirement of the scientific community. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.