Workflow

[Reagan Moore]

Tony:
The reason for interoperability between workflow environments is 
contained within your message.

>
>Any project which wishes to develop a workflow creation, submission &
>execution tool would write the appropriate software so that a user could
>select from a set of tools and data sources (from the registry) and string
>them together with some flow logic into the workflow. This would then be
>submitted to a job execution service etc.
>


A reason for workflow interoperability is to minimize the amount of 
software that must be written to construct a new data processing 
pipeline.    Workflow systems interact with:
- data grids for managing distributed collections
- grids to support distributed computation
- portals to organize interactive access to the combined systems

Examples of workflow systems that simplify processing (and interact 
with the above environments) include:
- Kepler/Ptolemy - this provides actors for manipulating iterative 
processing.  The computation can be done locally or remotely.
- Matrix - provides a dataflow language that simplifies description 
and management of state information within the dataflow system
- Chimera/Pegasus - supports mapping of workflow environments to grid 
technology for distributed computation
- Condor DAGman - supports processing of directed acyclic graphs

These systems are developing interoperability mechanisms for 
interchanging workflows.

Reagan Moore