CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: Infrastructure for Enabling Systematic Development and Research of Scientific Workflow Management Systems

Scientific workflows are used almost universally across research and engineering disciplines and have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the past several decades (e.g., first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the detection of an exotic nuclear decay). Workflow management systems (WMSs) are software systems that provide abstraction and automation for facilitating access to and management of distributed and heterogeneous compute and storage resources. They enable a broad range of researchers to easily define sophisticated computational processes and to then execute them efficiently on parallel and distributed computing platforms. Unfortunately, in spite of widespread adoption of workflows, the technology landscape is segmented and presents significant barriers to entry due to the existence of dozens of seemingly comparable, yet incompatible, systems. The research landscape is also disjoint, making it difficult to compare and contrast approaches, verify and reproduce results, and build upon existing work.

This project will engage with representatives from the workflows community – including researchers, developers, science and engineering users, and cyberinfrastructure experts. Through targeted community surveys and focused workshops, the project will gather a diverse set of perspectives, create a community-owned WMS inventory and common knowledge taxonomy, define an experimental methodology for measuring WMS capabilities, and develop a blueprint for a community research infrastructure. This proposed infrastructure has the potential to truly democratize workflows research, enabling researchers, postdocs, and students, irrespective of their institutions, to access cutting-edge infrastructure for comparison, evaluation, and verification of workflows research results.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.