Open Grid Forum 21 Report (ID - 108)
Ian Taylor
School of Computer Science,
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Email: Ian.J.Taylor@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
26th Nov 2007
This GridNet2 report provides an overview of my activities in research and working
groups at the Open Grid Forum (OGF) 21 meeting in Seattle (Oct 15-19). I participated
in the following:
• Co-organized, chaired and gave introductory comments at the Workflow Management
Research Group (WFMRG) session in the Portland on Monday 15th October at 9 am
(90 Minute Session).
• Co-organizer and participant of the GridNet2 eScience Workshop, held on Thursday
18th October in the Leonesa III - three 90- minute sessions.
• Attended a number of other sessions and keynotes, including “Think Little: The
Proliferation of Small Clusters Means Big Changes ”, “Web 2.0 Meets Grids Panel”,
“eSocial Science: ourSpaces” amongst others.
• Held a number of follow-up meetings for the WFM-RG Session.
This document just focuses on the on-going activities within the workflow management
research group by providing an overview of the session and the current direction of the
research group and how this will lead to standards activities over the next year.
I chaired and co-organised the Workflow Management Research Group (WFM-RG)session
with the group’s co-chair, Ewa Deelman. The title of the session was Workflow Sharing
and Interoperability and focused on the extracting some user requirements from existing
systems for being able to interoperate between current workflow environments. We tried to
answer questions such as “is there a call for such interoperability?” and “if so, how should
this be achieved?”. The Agenda was:
• 9:00 Session Overview (Ian Taylor)
• 9:05 Matt Shields Sharing Workflows Recap of OGF 20
• 9:15 Research document use cases for workflow sharing, volunteers
• 9:20 Ewa Deelman NSF Workflow Interoperability workshop and what transpired in
the execution breakout
• 9:35 Andrew Harrison Kepler/Triana integration - interoperability Use Case 1
• 9:50 Maurizio Melato— Web Based Grid Workflow System: A-WARE project
• 10:05 Dave De RouremyExperiment
• 10:20 All—Future plan (Use cases documents)
1
The session was timely appearing just after a Workshop on Scientific and Scholarly Workflow Cyberinfrastructure: Improving Interoperability, Sustainability and Platform Convergence in Scientific and Scholarly Workflow1 . The session carried on with the themes from
this workshop (which both Ewa and I attended and presented at) in order to get feedback from the OGF community in the usefulness of such interoperability. The results were
promising. The session was a success with around 40 participants and several people made
comments at the closing discussion about their experiences and noted that they would be
willing to provide use cases.
This work is complimentary to other effort in this field. A networking proposal “W4eSNet: Workflows for e-Science Network” is to be submitted to the eScience networking
call with many participants from this session and the field in general. We are hoping to
build up momentum in OGF22 on this theme by gather use cases and presenting these
at the next OGF. Once the use cases are complete then we may chose to propose to spin
off a working group in order to create standardised interfaces for interoperability between
workflow systems.
Gridnet2 funded around 50% of this trip, the rest was funded by internal grants at
Cardiff.
1
Supported by NSF and the Mellon Foundation. October 4-5, 2007
2