Scientific Workflows Use Cases

These use cases describe how researchers use workflow tools to automate complex research computing processes. There are at least two motivations for automation: first, to improve research productivity by freeing researchers from time-consuming tasks that can be automated; second, to make the research process reproducible, capturing and recording every step of the process so other researchers can inspect and validate the process behind the researcher’s conclusions.

Research computing processes are extremely diverse. Consequently, there are a variety of workflow tools in use. The public research computing community enables workflow tools by providing APIs for basic computing services, such as: job submission and management, data movement, and resource configuration and status information. Using these APIs, a workflow tool can automate the execution of a research computing process. Another important community function is coordinating the execution environments across resources: making them as similar as possible so individual research jobs can be run on a wider variety of computing resources.