Special section on workflow systems and applications in e-Science

摘要

Rapid development of Internet and Grid technologies has greatly extended the number of resources which scientists can apply for research. More and more scientific advances are achieved via experiments which consist of large volumes of computing tasks and data. Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWMS) are a key technology to integrate computing and data analysis components, and to control the execution and logical sequences among them. By hiding the complexity in an underlying infrastructure, SWMSs allow scientists to design complex scientific experiments, access geographically distributed data files, and execute the experiments using computing resources at multiple organizations. In this way, domain scientists can effectively use available resources while focusing on the logic of the experiments instead of low level technical details.