ScyFlow: an environment for the visual specification and execution of scientific workflows

摘要

With the advent of Grid technologies, scientists and engineers are building more complex applications to utilize distributed Grid resources. Core Grid services provide a path for accessing and utilizing these resources in a secure and seamless fashion. However, what the scientists need is an environment that will allow them to specify their application runs at a high organizational level, and then will support efficient execution across any given set or sets of distributed resources. We have been designing and implementing ScyFlow, a dual-interface architecture, both Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Application Programming Interface (API), that addresses this problem. The scientist/user specifies the application tasks along with the necessary control and data flow, and then monitors and manages the execution of the resulting workflow across the distributed resources. In this paper, we utilize two scenarios to provide the details of the two modules of the project, the visual editor and the runtime workflow engine.