Scientific workflow system

A scientific workflow system is a specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application.

Distributed scientists can collaborate on conducting large scale scientific experiments and knowledge discovery applications using distributed systems of computing resources, data sets, and devices. Scientific workflow systems play an important role in enabling this vision.

More specialized scientific workflow systems, e.g. Discovery Net, Apache Taverna and Kepler, provide a visual programming front end enabling users to easily construct their applications as a visual graph by connecting nodes together, and tools have also been developed to build such applications in a platform-independent manner. Each directed edge in the graph of a workflow typically represents a connection from the output of one application to the input of the next. A sequence of such edges may be called a pipeline.

A bioinformatics workflow management system is a specialized scientific workflow system focused on bioinformatics.

The simplest computerized scientific workflows are scripts that call in data, programs, and other inputs and produce outputs that might include visualizations and analytical results. These may be implemented in programs such as R or MATLAB, or using a scripting language such as Python or Perl with a command-line interface.

There are many motives for differentiating scientific workflows from traditional business process workflows. These include:

By focusing on the scientists, the focus of designing scientific workflow system shifts away from the workflow scheduling activities, typically considered by grid computing environments for optimizing the execution of complex computations on predefined resources, to a domain-specific view of what data types, tools and distributed resources should be made available to the scientists and how can one make them easily accessible and with specific Quality of Service requirements

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