Designing Scientific Software one Workflow at a Time

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

PROPOSAL NUMBER: 0725332 TITLE: Designing Scientific Software One Workflow at a Time PI: Ewa Deelman and Yolanda Gil Much of science today relies on software to make new discoveries. This software embodies scientific analyses that are frequently composed of several application components and created collaboratively by different researchers. Computational workflows have recently emerged as a paradigm to manage these large-scale and large-scope scientific analyses. Workflows represent computations that are often executed in geographically distributed settings, their interdependencies, their requirements and their data products. The design of these workflows is at the core of today?s scientific discovery processes and must be treated as scientific products in their own right. The focus of this research is to develop the foundations for a science of design of scientific processes embodied in the new artifact that is the computational workflow. The work will integrate best practices and lessons learned in existing workflow applications, and extend them in order to define and formalize design principles of computational workflows. This work will result in a fundamentally new approach to designing workflows that will greatly improve the scientific software design methodology by defining and formalizing design principles, and by familiarizing the scientific community with these effective workflow design processes.