Case Studies on the Use of Workflow Technologies for Scientific Analysis: The Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the Telescience Project

Abstract

The advent of “Grids,” or Grid computing, has led to a fundamental shift in the development of applications for managing and performing computational or data-intensive analyses. A current challenge faced by the Grid community entails modeling the work patterns of domain or bench scientists and providing robust solutions utilizing distributed infrastructures. These challenges spawned efforts to develop “workflows” to manage programs and data on behalf of the end user. The technologies come from multiple scientific fields, often with disparate definitions, and have unique advantages and disadvantages, depending on the nature of the scientific process in which they are used. In this chapter, we argue that to maximize the impact of these efforts, there is value in promoting the use of workflows within a tiered, hierarchical structure where each of these emerging workflow pieces are interoperable. We present workflow models of the Telescience™ Project¹ and BIRN² architectures as frameworks that manage multiple tiers of workflows to provide tailored solutions for end-to-end scientific processes.

http://www.telescience.ucsd.edu

http://www.nBIRN.net