Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userWorkflows Community Summit: Advancing the State-of-the-art of Scientific Workflows Management Systems Research and Development
74
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Rafael Ferreira da Silva
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Scientific workflows are a cornerstone of modern scientific computing, and they have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the last decade. Many of these workflows have high computational, storage, and/or communication demands, and thus must execute on a wide range of large-scale platforms, from large clouds to upcoming exascale HPC platforms. Workflows will play a crucial role in the data-oriented and post-Moores computing landscape as they democratize the application of cutting-edge research techniques, computationally intensive methods, and use of new computing platforms. As workflows continue to be adopted by scientific projects and user communities, they are becoming more complex. Workflows are increasingly composed of tasks that perform computations such as short machine learning inference, multi-node simulations, long-running machine learning model training, amongst others, and thus increasingly rely on heterogeneous architectures that include CPUs but also GPUs and accelerators. The workflow management system (WMS) technology landscape is currently segmented and presents significant barriers to entry due to the hundreds of seemingly comparable, yet incompatible, systems that exist. Another fundamental problem is that there are conflicting theoretical bases and abstractions for a WMS. Systems that use the same underlying abstractions can likely be translated between, which is not the case for systems that use different abstractions. More information: https://workflowsri.org/summits/technical
rate research
Read More
Scientific workflows have been used almost universally across scientific domains, and have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the past several decades. Many of these workflows have high computational, storage, and/or communication demands, and thus must execute on a wide range of large-scale platforms, from large clouds to upcoming exascale high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. These executions must be managed using some software infrastructure. Due to the popularity of workflows, workflow management systems (WMSs) have been developed to provide abstractions for creating and executing workflows conveniently, efficiently, and portably. While these efforts are all worthwhile, there are now hundreds of independent WMSs, many of which are moribund. As a result, the WMS landscape is segmented and presents significant barriers to entry due to the hundreds of seemingly comparable, yet incompatible, systems that exist. As a result, many teams, small and large, still elect to build their own custom workflow solution rather than adopt, or build upon, existing WMSs. This current state of the WMS landscape negatively impacts workflow users, developers, and researchers. The Workflows Community Summit was held online on January 13, 2021. The overarching goal of the summit was to develop a view of the state of the art and identify crucial research challenges in the workflow community. Prior to the summit, a survey sent to stakeholders in the workflow community (including both developers of WMSs and users of workflows) helped to identify key challenges in this community that were translated into 6 broad themes for the summit, each of them being the object of a focused discussion led by a volunteer member of the community. This report documents and organizes the wealth of information provided by the participants before, during, and after the summit.
Here we present CaosDB, a Research Data Management System (RDMS) designed to ensure seamless integration of inhomogeneous data sources and repositories of legacy data. Its primary purpose is the management of data from biomedical sciences, both from simulations and experiments during the complete research data lifecycle. An RDMS for this domain faces particular challenges: Research data arise in huge amounts, from a wide variety of sources, and traverse a highly branched path of further processing. To be accepted by its users, an RDMS must be built around workflows of the scientists and practices and thus support changes in workflow and data structure. Nevertheless it should encourage and support the development and observation of standards and furthermore facilitate the automation of data acquisition and processing with specialized software. The storage data model of an RDMS must reflect these complexities with appropriate semantics and ontologies while offering simple methods for finding, retrieving, and understanding relevant data. We show how CaosDB responds to these challenges and give an overview of the CaosDB Server, its data model and its easy-to-learn CaosDB Query Language. We briefly discuss the status of the implementation, how we currently use CaosDB, and how we plan to use and extend it.
Scientific workflows are a cornerstone of modern scientific computing. They are used to describe complex computational applications that require efficient and robust management of large volumes of data, which are typically stored/processed at heterogeneous, distributed resources. The workflow research and development community has employed a number of methods for the quantitative evaluation of existing and novel workflow algorithms and systems. In particular, a common approach is to simulate workflow executions. In previous work, we have presented a collection of tools that have been used for aiding research and development activities in the Pegasus project, and that have been adopted by others for conducting workflow research. Despite their popularity, there are several shortcomings that prevent easy adoption, maintenance, and consistency with the evolving structures and computational requirements of production workflows. In this work, we present WorkflowHub, a community framework that provides a collection of tools for analyzing workflow execution traces, producing realistic synthetic workflow traces, and simulating workflow executions. We demonstrate the realism of the generated synthetic traces by comparing simulated executions of these traces with actual workflow executions. We also contrast these results with those obtained when using the previously available collection of tools. We find that our framework not only can be used to generate representative synthetic workflow traces (i.e., with workflow structures and task characteristics distributions that resembles those in traces obtained from real-world workflow executions), but can also generate representative workflow traces at larger scales than that of available workflow traces.
It is common practice to partition complex workflows into separate channels in order to speed up their completion times. When this is done within a distributed environment, unavoidable fluctuations make individual realizations depart from the expected average gains. We present a method for breaking any complex workflow into several workloads in such a way that once their outputs are joined, their full completion takes less time and exhibit smaller variance than when running in only one channel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in two different scenarios; the optimization of a convex function and the transmission of a large computer file over the Internet.
When partitioning workflows in realistic scenarios, the knowledge of the processing units is often vague or unknown. A naive approach to addressing this issue is to perform many controlled experiments for different workloads, each consisting of multiple number of trials in order to estimate the mean and variance of the specific workload. Since this controlled experimental approach can be quite costly in terms of time and resources, we propose a variant of the Gibbs Sampling algorithm that uses a sequence of Bayesian inference updates to estimate the processing characteristics of the processing units. Using the inferred characteristics of the processing units, we are able to determine the best way to split a workflow for processing it in parallel with the lowest expected completion time and least variance.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
