Information Technology seminars

MURPA Seminar - On Accelerating Scientific Discovery using Scientific Workflows and the Kepler System

Date and time:

07/08/2008, 9:30 to 11:00

Location:

Building: 26, Room: 135, (via HD interactive video) Clayton Campus

Presenters:

Ilkay Altintas

Abstract:

Scientific workflows are representations of generally one and  possible more processes in the scientific method. They combine data  and computational procedures into a configurable, structured set of  steps that implement semi-automated computational solutions of a  scientific problem. Each atomic step in a scientific workflow uses a  technology to carry out the computation or data processing. Thus, as  technology progresses the requirements and motivations for usage of  scientific workflows evolve with it. The first part of this invited  talk aims to explore this evolution of how scientific workflows are  used from late 1990s to date and discusses the advantages gained from  this usage. In the second half we delve into current and expected  advantages of scientific workflow systems as they mature from art to  commodity, with a focus on provenance of scientific workflows and  related products.

As it has been proven by the recent workshops, challenges and  community interest, capturing provenance information for  computational experiments and simulations is a significant advantage  of using scientific workflows to conduct computational studies. Many  scientific workflow systems today provide provenance recording  functionality. However, lack of generic tools to support usage of the  collected information limits the usage of the provenance  functionality by different users. This talk concludes by presenting a  vision for creating a provenance framework to support a series of  steps in the lifecycle of provenance information starting from data  collection, which could serve multiple data and computational models,  to the usages of this data.

Speaker biographies:

Ilkay Altintas leads the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD where she also is the Assistant Director of the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research. She currently works on different aspects of scientific workflows in collaboration with the DOE Scientific Data Management Center and various cross-disciplinary NSF projects. She is a co- initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to scientific workflows, conceptual data querying, and software modeling. Ilkay Altintas holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering, both from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and is an external PhD student of Computational Science at University of Amsterdam, working with Prof. P.M.A. Sloot.

For more information, visit:

http://www.sdsc.edu/~altintas

Enquiries:

Ronald Pose

Research group website:

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/events/2008/murpa.html