Henri Casanova, a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa information and computer sciences professor, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for the project WRENCH: A Simulation Workbench for Scientific Workflow for Users, Developers and Researchers. This project received $499,000.00 in funding.
In partnership with Rafael Ferreira da Silva at the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California, this project will develop a framework for the study of scientific workflow applications. See the abstract for more details.
Scientific workflows have become mainstream for conducting large-scale scientific research. As a result, many workflow applications and Workflow Management Systems (WMS) have been developed as part of the cyber infrastructure to allow scientists to execute their applications seamlessly on a range of distributed platforms. In spite of many success stories, building large-scale workflows and orchestrating their executions efficiently (in terms of performance, reliability, and cost) remains a challenge given the complexity of the workflows themselves and the complexity of the underlying execution platforms.
The broad objective of this work is to provide foundational software, the Workflow Simulation Workbench (WRENCH), upon which to develop the above experimental science approach. Capitalizing on recent advances in distributed application and platform simulation technology, WRENCH makes it possible to quickly prototype workflow, WMS implementations, and decision-making algorithms and evaluate/compare alternative options scalably and accurately for arbitrary, and often hypothetical, experimental scenarios.
For more information, go to the information and computer sciences website.
