Forum 04/13/2006

“Kepler: A Collaborative Open-Source Project to Make Scientific Workflows Happen”

Ilkay Altintas, Assistant Director – National Lab for Advanced Data Research, Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies (SWAT)

While an increasing number of computational tools for distributed computing in science have become available in the last couple of years, they are mostly at an infrastructural level making it difficult to use for the domain scientist. Scientific workflow user environments aim at improving this situation by wrapping distributed tools and making them available in a user-friendly, visual programming environment. Scientific workflow systems provide tools with customizable and extensible graphical user interfaces to combine different Cyberinfrastructure technologies along with efficient methods for using them, and thus to increase the efficiency of the scientist and promote scientific discovery. Keple is a cross-project cross-institutional collaboration to develop an open-source scientific workflow system, In this talk, first scientific workflows along with requirements and examples will be introduced, then the Kepler Scientific Workflow System, the current imaging functionality in Kepler and the open-source and collaborative software practice behind it will be presented.

While an increasing number of computational tools for distributed computing in science have become available in the last couple of years, they are mostly at an infrastructural level making it difficult to use for the domain scientist. Scientific workflow user environments aim at improving this situation by wrapping distributed tools and making them available in a user-friendly, visual programming environment. Scientific workflow systems provide tools with customizable and extensible graphical user interfaces to combine different Cyberinfrastructure technologies along with efficient methods for using them, and thus to increase the efficiency of the scientist and promote scientific discovery. Kepler (http://kepler-project.org) is a cross-project cross-institutional collaboration to develop an open-source scientific workflow system, In this talk, first scientific workflows along with requirements and examples will be introduced, then the Kepler Scientific Workflow System, the current imaging functionality in Kepler and the open-source and collaborative software practice behind it will be presented.