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Workflows and e-Science: An overview of workflow system features and capabilities

Future Generation Computer SystemsPublished 11 July 2008
Ewa Deelman, Dennis Gannon, Matt Shields, Ian Taylor
Citations818
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.55
SNIP2.23

TL;DR

The taxonomy provides end users with a mechanism by which they can assess the suitability of workflow in general and how they might use these features to make an informed choice about which workflow system would be a good choice for their particular application.

Abstract

Scientific workflow systems have become a necessary tool for many applications, enabling the composition and execution of complex analysis on distributed resources. Today there are many workflow systems, often with overlapping functionality. A key issue for potential users of workflow systems is the need to be able to compare the capabilities of the various available tools. There can be confusion about system functionality and the tools are often selected without a proper functional analysis. In this paper we extract a taxonomy of features from the way scientists make use of existing workflow systems and we illustrate this feature set by providing some examples taken from existing workflow systems. The taxonomy provides end users with a mechanism by which they can assess the suitability of workflow in general and how they might use these features to make an informed choice about which workflow system would be a good choice for their particular application.

Keywords

Computer ScienceDecision Sciences