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2 Publications visible to you, out of a total of 2
A terminology for scientific workflow systems

Abstract (Expand)

The term “scientific workflow” has evolved over the last two decades to encompass a broad range of compositions of interdependent compute tasks and data movements. It has also become an umbrella term … for processing in modern scientific applications. Today, many scientific applications can be considered as workflows made of multiple dependent steps, and hundreds of workflow systems have been developed to manage and run these scientific workflows. However, no turnkey solution has emerged from the field to address the diversity of scientific processes and the infrastructure on which they are supposed to be implemented. Instead, new research problems requiring the execution of scientific workflows with some novel feature often lead to the development of an entirely new workflow system. A direct consequence of this situation is that many existing workflow management systems (WMSs) share some salient features, offer similar functionalities, and can manage the same categories of workflows but at the same time also have some distinct capabilities that can be important for specific applications. This situation makes researchers who develop workflows face the complex question of selecting a WMS. This selection can be driven by technical considerations, to find the system that is the most appropriate for their application and for the computing and storage resources available to them, or other factors such as reputation, adoption, strong community support, or long-term sustainability. To address this problem, a group of WMS developers and practitioners joined their efforts to produce a community-based terminology of WMSs. This paper summarizes their findings and introduces this new terminology to characterize WMSs. This terminology is composed of fives axes: workflow structure and characteristics, composition, orchestration, data management, and metadata capture. Each axis comprises several concepts that capture the prominent features of WMSs. Based on this terminology, this paper also presents a classification of 23 existing WMSs according to the proposed axes and terms.

Authors: Frédéric Suter, Tainã Coleman, İlkay Altintaş, Rosa M. Badia, Bartosz Balis, Kyle Chard, Iacopo Colonnelli, Ewa Deelman, Paolo Di Tommaso, Thomas Fahringer, Carole Goble, Shantenu Jha, Daniel S. Katz, Johannes Köster, Ulf Leser, Kshitij Mehta, Hilary Oliver, J.-Luc Peterson, Giovanni Pizzi, Loïc Pottier, Raül Sirvent, Eric Suchyta, Douglas Thain, Sean R. Wilkinson, Justin M. Wozniak, Rafael Ferreira da Silva

Date Published: 2026

Publication Type: Journal Article

Automatic, Efficient and Scalable Provenance Registration for FAIR HPC Workflows

Abstract (Expand)

Provenance registration is becoming more and more important, as we increase the size and number of experiments performed using computers. In particular, when provenance is recorded in HPC environments, … it must be efficient and scalable. In this paper, we propose a provenance registration method for scientific workflows, efficient enough to run in supercomputers (thus, it could run in other environments with more relaxed restrictions, such as distributed ones). It also must be scalable in order to deal with large workflows, that are more typically used in HPC. We also target transparency for the user, shielding them from having to specify how provenance must be recorded. We implement our design using the COMPSs programming model as a Workflow Management System (WfMS) and use RO-Crate as a well-established specification to record and publish provenance. Experiments are provided, demonstrating the run time efficiency and scalability of our solution.

Authors: Raul Sirvent, Javier Conejero, Francesc Lordan, Jorge Ejarque, Laura Rodriguez-Navas, Jose M. Fernandez, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Rosa M. Badia

Date Published: 1st Nov 2022

Publication Type: Conference Proceeding

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