GridNet2 Funding Report
OGF 21, Seattle, USA, October 15th-19th 2007
Matthew Shields [m.s.shields@cs.cf.ac.uk]
Gridnet2 ID: 124
School of Computer Science, Cardiff University
December 3, 2007
This report provides details of the activities undertaken by the author funded by the GridNet2 grant at
the Open Grid Forum (OGF21) meeting, held in Seattle, May 15th to 19th 2007.
Workflow Management Research Group (WfM-RG) – Workflow Sharing and Interoperability
The Workflow Management Research Group session on workflow sharing and interoperability was the key
session for me to intend as it was the basis of the proposal under which I received the GridNet2 funding,
namely to assist restarting interest and activity in the research group. I was the first presenter at the session
after Ian Taylor’s introduction, giving an overview of the previous session from OGF20 in Manchester
and summarising the activity on developing workflow sharing and interoperability use cases in the period
between the meetings. As part of my duties as co-secretary for the group I also took the meeting minutes
and agreed to continue the organisation of the use case collection document.
The session consisted of a number of presentations starting with Ian Taylor’s introduction, and followed
by my group status and summary. The other presentations included: Ewa Deelman (ISI) summarising
a recent NSF/Mellon sponsored workshop entitled A Workshop on Scientific and Scholarly Workflow Cyberinfrastructure: Improving Interoperability, Sustainability and Platform Convergence in Scientific And
Scholarly Workflow. The findings of this workshop were of particular interest to the group since they outlined key challenges for the workflow community including fault tolerance, parallelism and long running
workflows, and highlighted the fact that scientists don’t want a “one-size-fits-all” solution but they do want
to be able to reuse abstract workflow descriptions across systems, and they do want an easier way to discover a given workflow tool’s capabilities to enable the comparison of the available tools; Andrew Harrison
(Cardiff) followed with his perspective on workflow embedding, the ability to run workflows from one tool
within the workflow of another. He focussed on the ability to share data and discussed RESTful approaches
to how that might be achieved; Maurizo Melato (NICE srl) gave an overview of a Web based grid workflow system, A-WARE, and talked about leveraging standards such as BPEL, JBI (ESB), Business Process
Modelling Notation (BPMN), and a workflow life-cycle consisting of design (method user), grounding (IT
user) service binding and data mapping, deployment (IT user), submission (end user); Finally, David de
Roure (Southampton) gave an overview of myExperiment and discussed distributed services, scientists and
the “social life of workflows.”
After the presenters had finished the meeting moved onto a round table discussion forum with the group
tabling a research document for workflow sharing and interoperability use cases. Topics included interoperability between Triana/Pegasus, the scope and representation of workflow languages, outreach to the WfMC
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standards body, and the need for a workflow comparison document. After the discussion the meeting content
was summarised and a renewed request for contributions to the use case research document was made via
the group mailing list.
GridNet2 eScience Workshop
I attended the GridNet2 eScience Workshop and presented a summary of the work being undertaken at
Cardiff, that GridNet2 funding has helped. The presentation included a summary of the key points from
the earlier WfM-RG workshops at both OGF 20 and 21 and outlined Cardiff’s view on workflow sharing.
Key to this is to focus on finding use cases and in particular to focus on sharing data, making sending and
receiving it as simple as possible, a common theme in my activities at this OGF. During the discussions
concerning the future of GridNet I expressed my willingness to support a new application for funding and
reconfirmed my intent to continue collaborating with the colleagues I have interacted with as part of the
current funding.
Other sessions
I participated in a number of other OGF sessions including some of the Web 2.0 sessions, myExperiment
workshops and OGSA workflow meetings. The myExperiment workshops were of particular interest and
relevance to me since some of the current work on Triana is to do with myExperiment integration, workflow
sharing and interoperability. The OGF meeting was a good opportunity to hear what the myExperiment
developers had to say, especially in light of other interested parties in some well attended sessions.
Summary
This second OGF funded through GridNet2 helped cement some of the developments made in the area of
workflow sharing from OGF20 and the discussions on interoperability in this OGF. My continued focus at
OGF meetings was with workflow subjects in general and the WfM-RG in particular and as such the money
provided by GridNet2 to enable me to attend both of these meetings has been invaluable. I would be keen
to continue with GridNet funding as I think it gives a unique opportunity for the UK e-Science community,
especially newer researchers, to interact with peers both nationally and more importantly internationally. I
would support any new GridNet application and have expressed my commitment to helping any such effort.
Actions
• Ensure the WfM-RG Web pages are updated with the meeting summary and presentation slides.
• Organise the WfM-RG research document on workflow sharing and interoperability.
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