Scientific Workflow Online

 
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VIEW, a Web-based scientific workflow management system (SWFMS) developed at Wayne State University, not only enables a scientist to design workflows, but also provides a runtime system to execute scientific workflows either on a dedicated VIEW server, or in a Cloud computing environment, or both. VIEW supports efficient collection, storage, querying, and visualization of workflow provenance. VIEW is currently used in several bioinformatics applications, including genomic recombination and gene conversion data analysis.

Citing VIEW (more papers):

[1] Cui Lin, Shiyong Lu, Xubo Fei, Artem Chebotko, Darshan Pai, Zhaoqiang Lai, Farshad Fotouhi, and Jing Hua, “A Reference Architecture for Scientific Workflow Management Systems and the VIEW SOA Solution”, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), 2(1), pp.79-92, 2009. Download.

[2] Xubo Fei and Shiyong Lu, “A Dataflow-Based Scientific Workflow Composition Framework”, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), 2011. In press. Download.

As a Web-based SWFMS, no installation, upgrade, and maintenance are required for end users. One can use VIEW simply via an Internet browser, such as Firefox and IE. As shown in Fig. 1, VIEW features a service-oriented architecture consisting of six loosely-coupled subsystems:

  • Workbench is the Web Portal for VIEW. Via the Workbench, a scientist can design and modify workflows, present data product and provenance, and manage subsystems.
  • Workflow Engine to schedule, execute, and manage workflows.
  • Workflow Monitor to display system status and handle exceptions.
  • Task Manager to schedule, execute, and manage tasks (i.e., primitive workflows).
  • Provenance Manager to store and query workflow provenance.
  • Data Product Manager to store and manage data products.

Fig 1. Service-oriented architecture for VIEW [1].


 “In the future, the rapidity with which any given discipline advances is likely to depend on how well the community acquires the necessary expertise in database, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies.”

-- Science, Vol. 323, no. 5919, pp. 1297-1298, 2009.