A Terminology for Scientific Workflow Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Suter, Frédéric, Coleman, Tainã, Altintaş, İlkay, Badia, Rosa M., Balis, Bartosz, Chard, Kyle, Colonnelli, Iacopo, Deelman, Ewa, Di Tommaso, Paolo, Fahringer, Thomas, Goble, Carole, Jha, Shantenu, Katz, Daniel S., Köster, Johannes, Leser, Ulf, Mehta, Kshitij, Oliver, Hilary, Peterson, J. -Luc, Pizzi, Giovanni, Pottier, Loïc, Sirvent, Raül, Suchyta, Eric, Thain, Douglas, Wilkinson, Sean R., Wozniak, Justin M., da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Suter, Frédéric
Coleman, Tainã
Altintaş, İlkay
Badia, Rosa M.
Balis, Bartosz
Chard, Kyle
Colonnelli, Iacopo
Deelman, Ewa
Di Tommaso, Paolo
Fahringer, Thomas
Goble, Carole
Jha, Shantenu
Katz, Daniel S.
Köster, Johannes
Leser, Ulf
Mehta, Kshitij
Oliver, Hilary
Peterson, J. -Luc
Pizzi, Giovanni
Pottier, Loïc
Sirvent, Raül
Suchyta, Eric
Thain, Douglas
Wilkinson, Sean R.
Wozniak, Justin M.
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
author_facet Suter, Frédéric
Coleman, Tainã
Altintaş, İlkay
Badia, Rosa M.
Balis, Bartosz
Chard, Kyle
Colonnelli, Iacopo
Deelman, Ewa
Di Tommaso, Paolo
Fahringer, Thomas
Goble, Carole
Jha, Shantenu
Katz, Daniel S.
Köster, Johannes
Leser, Ulf
Mehta, Kshitij
Oliver, Hilary
Peterson, J. -Luc
Pizzi, Giovanni
Pottier, Loïc
Sirvent, Raül
Suchyta, Eric
Thain, Douglas
Wilkinson, Sean R.
Wozniak, Justin M.
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
contents The term scientific workflow has evolved over the last two decades to encompass a broad range of compositions of interdependent compute tasks and data movements. It has also become an umbrella term for processing in modern scientific applications. Today, many scientific applications can be considered as workflows made of multiple dependent steps, and hundreds of workflow management systems (WMSs) have been developed to manage and run these workflows. However, no turnkey solution has emerged to address the diversity of scientific processes and the infrastructure on which they are implemented. Instead, new research problems requiring the execution of scientific workflows with some novel feature often lead to the development of an entirely new WMS. A direct consequence is that many existing WMSs share some salient features, offer similar functionalities, and can manage the same categories of workflows but also have some distinct capabilities. This situation makes researchers who develop workflows face the complex question of selecting a WMS. This selection can be driven by technical considerations, to find the system that is the most appropriate for their application and for the resources available to them, or other factors such as reputation, adoption, strong community support, or long-term sustainability. To address this problem, a group of WMS developers and practitioners joined their efforts to produce a community-based terminology of WMSs. This paper summarizes their findings and introduces this new terminology to characterize WMSs. This terminology is composed of fives axes: workflow characteristics, composition, orchestration, data management, and metadata capture. Each axis comprises several concepts that capture the prominent features of WMSs. Based on this terminology, this paper also presents a classification of 23 existing WMSs according to the proposed axes and terms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_07838
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Terminology for Scientific Workflow Systems
Suter, Frédéric
Coleman, Tainã
Altintaş, İlkay
Badia, Rosa M.
Balis, Bartosz
Chard, Kyle
Colonnelli, Iacopo
Deelman, Ewa
Di Tommaso, Paolo
Fahringer, Thomas
Goble, Carole
Jha, Shantenu
Katz, Daniel S.
Köster, Johannes
Leser, Ulf
Mehta, Kshitij
Oliver, Hilary
Peterson, J. -Luc
Pizzi, Giovanni
Pottier, Loïc
Sirvent, Raül
Suchyta, Eric
Thain, Douglas
Wilkinson, Sean R.
Wozniak, Justin M.
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The term scientific workflow has evolved over the last two decades to encompass a broad range of compositions of interdependent compute tasks and data movements. It has also become an umbrella term for processing in modern scientific applications. Today, many scientific applications can be considered as workflows made of multiple dependent steps, and hundreds of workflow management systems (WMSs) have been developed to manage and run these workflows. However, no turnkey solution has emerged to address the diversity of scientific processes and the infrastructure on which they are implemented. Instead, new research problems requiring the execution of scientific workflows with some novel feature often lead to the development of an entirely new WMS. A direct consequence is that many existing WMSs share some salient features, offer similar functionalities, and can manage the same categories of workflows but also have some distinct capabilities. This situation makes researchers who develop workflows face the complex question of selecting a WMS. This selection can be driven by technical considerations, to find the system that is the most appropriate for their application and for the resources available to them, or other factors such as reputation, adoption, strong community support, or long-term sustainability. To address this problem, a group of WMS developers and practitioners joined their efforts to produce a community-based terminology of WMSs. This paper summarizes their findings and introduces this new terminology to characterize WMSs. This terminology is composed of fives axes: workflow characteristics, composition, orchestration, data management, and metadata capture. Each axis comprises several concepts that capture the prominent features of WMSs. Based on this terminology, this paper also presents a classification of 23 existing WMSs according to the proposed axes and terms.
title A Terminology for Scientific Workflow Systems
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07838