UCSD Workflow Expert Presents at Clayton

Prof Ilkay Altintas from UCSD visited Message Lab Feb-Mar 2007 to present a seminar and work with Message Lab researchers.

Grid Seminar at Monash University Clayton, 4pm, Tuesday 6th March 2007: Limited Opportunity

Title: Accelerating the Scientific Exploration Process with Scientific Workflows

Speaker: Ilkay Altintas, Assistant Director, National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR) Manager, Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies (SWAT) Lab San Diego Supercomputer Center(SDSC), UCSD

Venue: Lecture Theatre S12, Building 25 (Science Lecture Theatres), Monash University Clayton

Abstract

Although an increasing amount of middleware has emerged in the last few years to achieve remote data access, distributed job execution, and data management, orchestrating these technologies with minimal overhead still remains a difficult task for scientists. Scientific workflow systems improve this situation by creating interfaces to a variety of technologies and automating the execution and monitoring of the workflows. Workflow systems provide domain-independent customizable interfaces and tools that combine different Cyberinfrastructure technologies along with efficient methods for using them. As simulations and experiments move into the petascale regime, the orchestration of long running data and compute intensive tasks is becoming a major requirement for the successful steering and completion of scientific investigations.

A scientific workflow is the process of combining data and processes into a configurable, structured set of steps that implement semi-automated computational solutions of a scientific problem. Kepler is a cross-project collaboration, whose purpose is to develop a domain-independent scientific workflow system. It provides a workflow environment in which scientists design and execute scientific workflows by specifying the desired sequence of computational actions and the appropriate data flow, including required data transformations, between these steps. Currently deployed workflows range from local analytical pipelines to distributed, high–performance and high-throughput applications, which can be both data- and compute-intensive. The scientific workflow approach offers a number of advantages over traditional scripting-based approaches, including ease of configuration, improved reusability and maintenance of workflows and components (actors), automated provenance management, "smart" re-running of different versions of workflow instances, on-the-fly updateable parameters, monitoring of long running tasks, and support for fault-tolerance and recovery from failures.

We present an overview of common scientific workflow requirements and their associated features which are lacking in current state-of-the-art workflow management systems. We then illustrate these features using the Kepler workflow system, both from a user's and a "workflow engineer's" point-of-view. In particular, we highlight the use of some of the current features of Kepler in several scientific applications, as well as upcoming extensions and improvements that are geared specifically at environmental observatory and Grid Computing communities.

Bio

Ilkay Altintas leads the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD where she also is the Assistant Director of the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research. She currently works on different aspects of scientific workflows in collaboration with the DOE Scientific Data Management Center and various cross-disciplinary NSF projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to scientific workflows, conceptual data querying, and software modeling. Ilkay Altintas holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering, both from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and is an external PhD student of Computational Science at University of Amsterdam, working with Prof. P.M.A. Sloot.

See http://users.sdsc.edu/~altintas/ for more information on Ilkay’s research interests etc.,

Appointments with Speaker

As Ilkay is only here for a short time Tuesday 6th before and after the seminar is available for meetings with Ilkay. Contact Rob Gray, 03 9903 1249 or rob.gray@infotech.monash.edu.au to make a time with Ilkay 28 February, 2007, 06:00 PM AEST