Workflows for e-Science: Scientific Workflows for Grids

Product Description

This is a timely book presenting an overview of the current state-of-the-art within established projects, presenting many different aspects of workflow from users to tool builders. It provides an overview of active research, from a number of different perspectives. It includes theoretical aspects of workflow and deals with workflow for e-Science as opposed to e-Commerce. The topics covered will be of interest to a wide range of practitioners.

From the Back Cover

Scientific Workflow has seen massive growth in recent years as science becomes increasingly reliant on the analysis of massive data sets and the use of distributed resources. The workflow programming paradigm is seen as a means of managing the complexity in defining the analysis, executing the necessary computations on distributed resources, collecting information about the analysis results, and providing means to record and reproduce the scientific analysis.

Workflows for e-Science presents an overview of the current state of the art in the field. It brings together research from many leading computer scientists in the workflow area and provides real world examples from domain scientists actively involved in e-Science. The computer science topics addressed in the book provide a broad overview of active research focusing on the areas of workflow representations and process models, component and service-based workflows, standardization efforts, workflow frameworks and tools, and problem solving environments and portals.

The topics covered represent a broad range of scientific workflow and will be of interest to a wide range of computer science researchers, domain scientists interested in applying workflow technologies in their work, and engineers wanting to develop workflow systems and tools. As such Workflows for e-Science is an invaluable resource for potential or existing users of workflow technologies and a benchmark for developers and researchers.

About the Author

Dr. Ian Taylor has been a Lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science since 2002. He concurrently holds an adjunct Assistant Professorship at the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University and regularly offers consultations in the USA. He has a Ph.D. in Physics and Music and is the co-ordinator of Triana activities at Cardiff (http://www.trianacode.org). Through this he has been active in many major projects including GridLab, CoreGrid and GridOneD. His research interests include distributed techniques and workflow for Grid and P2P computing, which take in applications ranging from astrophysics and healthcare to distributed audio.
Ian has previously written a professional book for Springer on P2P, Web Services and Grids, and has published over 50 scientific papers. He has also co-edited a special edition for Journal of Grid Computing on Scientific Workflow.
Dr. Matthew Shields has been a research associate at Cardiff University, jointly in the Schools of Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, since 2001. He gained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cardiff University in the area of problem solving environments. Dr Shields is one of two lead developers for the Triana project and has been responsible for helping broaden its adoption within new application domains including biodiversity. His interests include problem solving environments, workflow, component and service based computing, Grid and high-performance computing.
Ewa Deelman is an Research Assistant Professor at the USC Computer Science Department and a Research Team Leader at the Center for Grid Technologies at the USC Information Sciences Institute. Dr. Deelman’s research interests include the design and exploration of collaborative scientific environments based on Grid technologies, with particular emphasis on workflow management as well as the management of large amounts of data and metadata. At ISI, Dr. Deelman is leading the Pegasus project, which designs and implements