Grid Workflow – Call for Contributions

GGF10, Berlin, Sunday March 7, 2004

 

Organizers:

    Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, (Groc/GFSG)

    Geoffrey Fox,  Indiana University, (co-chair Grid Computing

          Environments RG and Semantic Grids RG)

    Abbas Farazdel, IBM, (co-chair Life Sciences-RG)

    Carole Goble, University of Manchester, (co-chair Semantic grid RG)

    Ewa Deelman, USC ISI, (proposed SRG rg on workflow)

    Dave Berry, NeSC, (OGSA-WG)

 

This workshop will be a combination of invited presentations and refereed submissions.

 

Program Committee

 

David Angulo, Depaul University

Simon Cox, Southampton Regional e-Science Centre

Francisco Curbera, IBM Research

Tomasz Haupt, MsState University

Piyush Mehrotra, NASA Ames Research Center

Ravi Subramaniam, Intel

Scope and Content

 

Workflow is a critical part of the emerging Grid Computing Environments and captures the linkage of constituent services together in a hierarchical fashion to build larger composite services. Workflow captures "programming the Grid" and encompasses a broad range of approaches with names like "Service Orchestration", "Service or Process Coordination", "Service Conversation", "Web or Grid Scripting",

"Application Integration", or "Software Bus". One can identify at least four important aspects of workflow

1. User Environments or Workflow IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
2. Representation and language to express workflow
3. Translation or compilation
4. Execution & runtime support.

Workflow overlaps with areas such as "distributed system programming" and "virtual data management".

 

This workshop will build on two related workshops in this area

• GGF9 Life Sciences workshop
• UK e-Science December 2003 workshop at Edinburgh

 

The first was focused on identifying key requirements for Life Science Grids while the second is focused primarily on the e-Science UK effort.

 

We suggest that workflow is a relatively immature field and it is necessary to gain experience with several different approaches to several different applications. One goal of the GGF10 workshop will be to collect a set of exemplar applications and their requirements generalizing the Life Science meeting which is gathering requirements in their application area.

 

The workshop will be organized as four panels.  A coordinator for each panel will begin the discussion by raising the important issues and questions that the panelists have addressed. Each panel will have three or four participants who will each have approximately 15 to 20 minutes for presentations and answers to the panel coordinators questions. 

 

1. Applications – A study of the differences and similarities of Grid applications as seen from the perspective of workflow execution. 
2.  User Tools & Languages – What are our experiences with different programming languages for Grid workflow? How can an application scientist describe workflow in simple graphical terms?  What tools make it easy for users to execute workflow without becoming programmers?
3. Workflow Execution and Runtime Considerations – What are the appropriate execution models for Grid workflow?  How does this differ from commercial workflow execution?  What Web and Grid Services are required for reliable robust workflow execution?
4. Semantic Grids and Workflow Specification - ?

 

The meeting and panel conclusions will be summarized in a GGF informational document. Speakers will be invited to submit a paper for a Special Issue of Concurrency&Computation: Practice&Experience.

 

How To Participate

 

An extended abstract relating to one of the for panel themes above should be sent to the panel chair or to gannon@cs.indiana.edu.  Solicited papers can cover any of the following topics:

1)     A detailed workflow use-case based on real grid experience

2)     New workflow specification languages targeting grid applications.

3)     Workflow execution engines that interoperate with grid services.

4)     Grid services that support workflow execution.

5)     Specialized tools for managing Grid worflow.

 

The extended abstract can take the form of a position paper or short paper and it should be no more than 8 pages in length not counting bibliography.  The dates are

·       Extended abstracts Due: Jan 15, 2004

·       Final Program Available: Feb 1, 2004