Henri Casanova, Arnaud Giersch, Arnaud Legrand, Martin Quinson, Frédéric Suter
In this paper we present Simgrid, a toolkit for the versatile simulation of large scale distributed systems, whose development effort has been sustained for the last fifteen years. Over this time period SimGrid has evolved from a one-laboratory project in the U.S. into a scientific instrument developed by an international collaboration. The keys to making this evolution possible have been securing of funding, improving the quality of the software, and increasing the user base. In this paper we describe how we have been able to make advances on all three fronts, on which we plan to intensify our efforts over the upcoming years.
Wes Brewer, Ana Gainaru, Frédéric Suter, Feiyi Wang, Murali Emani, Shantenu Jha
AI integration is revolutionizing the landscape of HPC simulations, enhancing the importance, use, and performance of AI-driven HPC workflows. This paper surveys the diverse and rapidly evolving field of AI-driven HPC and provides a common conceptual basis for understanding AI-driven HPC workflows. Specifically, we use insights from different modes of coupling AI into HPC workflows to propose six execution motifs most commonly found in scientific applications. The proposed set of execution motifs is by definition incomplete and evolving. However, they allow us to analyze the primary performance challenges underpinning AI-driven HPC workflows. We close with a listing of open challenges, research issues, and suggested areas of investigation including the the need for specific benchmarks that will help evaluate and improve the execution of AI-driven HPC workflows.
Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Milad Abolhasani, Dionysios A. Antonopoulos, Laura Biven, Ryan Coffee, Ian T. Foster, Leslie Hamilton, Shantenu Jha, Theresa Mayer, Benjamin Mintz, Robert G. Moore, Salahudin Nimer, Noah Paulson, Woong Shin, Frederic Suter, Mitra Taheri, Michela Taufer, Newell R. Washburn
Scientific discovery is being revolutionized by AI and autonomous systems, yet current autonomous laboratories remain isolated islands unable to collaborate across institutions. We present the Autonomous Interconnected Science Lab Ecosystem (AISLE), a grassroots network transforming fragmented capabilities into a unified system that shorten the path from ideation to innovation to impact and accelerates discovery from decades to months. AISLE addresses five critical dimensions: (1) cross-institutional equipment orchestration, (2) intelligent data management with FAIR compliance, (3) AI-agent driven orchestration grounded in scientific principles, (4) interoperable agent communication interfaces, and (5) AI/ML-integrated scientific education. By connecting autonomous agents across institutional boundaries, autonomous science can unlock research spaces inaccessible to traditional approaches while democratizing cutting-edge technologies. This paradigm shift toward collaborative autonomous science promises breakthroughs in sustainable energy, materials development, and public health.
Frédéric Suter, Tainã Coleman, İlkay Altintaş, Rosa M. Badia, Bartosz Balis, Kyle Chard, Iacopo Colonnelli, Ewa Deelman, Paolo Di Tommaso, Thomas Fahringer, Carole Goble, Shantenu Jha, Daniel S. Katz, Johannes Köster, Ulf Leser, Kshitij Mehta, Hilary Oliver, J. -Luc Peterson, Giovanni Pizzi, Loïc Pottier, Raül Sirvent, Eric Suchyta, Douglas Thain, Sean R. Wilkinson, Justin M. Wozniak, Rafael Ferreira da Silva
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.
Ozgur O. Kilic, David K. Park, Yihui Ren, Tatiana Korchuganova, Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Joseph Boudreau, Tasnuva Chowdhury, Shengyu Feng, Raees Khan, Jaehyung Kim, Scott Klasky, Tadashi Maeno, Paul Nilsson, Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn, Norbert Podhorszki, Frédéric Suter, Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo, Alexei Klimentov, Adolfy Hoisie
Large-scale scientific collaborations like ATLAS, Belle II, CMS, DUNE, and others involve hundreds of research institutes and thousands of researchers spread across the globe. These experiments generate petabytes of data, with volumes soon expected to reach exabytes. Consequently, there is a growing need for computation, including structured data processing from raw data to consumer-ready derived data, extensive Monte Carlo simulation campaigns, and a wide range of end-user analysis. To manage these computational and storage demands, centralized workflow and data management systems are implemented. However, decisions regarding data placement and payload allocation are often made disjointly and via heuristic means. A significant obstacle in adopting more effective heuristic or AI-driven solutions is the absence of a quick and reliable introspective dynamic model to evaluate and refine alternative approaches. In this study, we aim to develop such an interactive system using real-world data. By examining job execution records from the PanDA workflow management system, we have pinpointed key performance indicators such as queuing time, error rate, and the extent of remote data access. The dataset includes five months of activity. Additionally, we are creating a generative AI model to simulate time series of payloads, which incorporate visible features like category, event count, and submitting group, as well as hidden features like the total computational load-derived from existing PanDA records and computing site capabilities. These hidden features, which are not visible to job allocators, whether heuristic or AI-driven, influence factors such as queuing times and data movement.
Maximilian Horzela, Henri Casanova, Manuel Giffels, Artur Gottmann, Robin Hofsaess, Günter Quast, Simone Rossi Tisbeni, Achim Streit, Frédéric Suter
Predicting the performance of various infrastructure design options in complex federated infrastructures with computing sites distributed over a wide area network that support a plethora of users and workflows, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), is not trivial. Due to the complexity and size of these infrastructures, it is not feasible to deploy experimental test-beds at large scales merely for the purpose of comparing and evaluating alternate designs. An alternative is to study the behaviours of these systems using simulation. This approach has been used successfully in the past to identify efficient and practical infrastructure designs for High Energy Physics (HEP). A prominent example is the Monarc simulation framework, which was used to study the initial structure of the WLCG. New simulation capabilities are needed to simulate large-scale heterogeneous computing systems with complex networks, data access and caching patterns. A modern tool to simulate HEP workloads that execute on distributed computing infrastructures based on the SimGrid and WRENCH simulation frameworks is outlined. Studies of its accuracy and scalability are presented using HEP as a case-study. Hypothetical adjustments to prevailing computing architectures in HEP are studied providing insights into the dynamics of a part of the WLCG and candidates for improvements.
Shengyu Feng, Jaehyung Kim, Yiming Yang, Joseph Boudreau, Tasnuva Chowdhury, Adolfy Hoisie, Raees Khan, Ozgur O. Kilic, Scott Klasky, Tatiana Korchuganova, Paul Nilsson, Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn, David K. Park, Norbert Podhorszki, Yihui Ren, Frederic Suter, Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Wei Yang, Shinjae Yoo, Tadashi Maeno, Alexei Klimentov
This paper presents a novel approach to the joint optimization of job scheduling and data allocation in grid computing environments. We formulate this joint optimization problem as a mixed integer quadratically constrained program. To tackle the nonlinearity in the constraint, we alternatively fix a subset of decision variables and optimize the remaining ones via Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). We solve the MILP problem at each iteration via an off-the-shelf MILP solver. Our experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing heuristic methods, employing either independent optimization or joint optimization strategies. We have also verified the generalization ability of our method over grid environments with various sizes and its high robustness to the algorithm hyper-parameters.
Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Deborah Bard, Kyle Chard, Shaun de Witt, Ian T. Foster, Tom Gibbs, Carole Goble, William Godoy, Johan Gustafsson, Utz-Uwe Haus, Stephen Hudson, Shantenu Jha, Laila Los, Drew Paine, Frédéric Suter, Logan Ward, Sean Wilkinson, Marcos Amaris, Yadu Babuji, Jonathan Bader, Riccardo Balin, Daniel Balouek, Sarah Beecroft, Khalid Belhajjame, Rajat Bhattarai, Wes Brewer, Paul Brunk, Silvina Caino-Lores, Henri Casanova, Daniela Cassol, Jared Coleman, Taina Coleman, Iacopo Colonnelli, Anderson Andrei Da Silva, Daniel de Oliveira, Pascal Elahi, Nour Elfaramawy, Wael Elwasif, Brian Etz, Thomas Fahringer, Wesley Ferreira, Rosa Filgueira, Jacob Fosso Tande, Luiz Gadelha, Andy Gallo, Daniel Garijo, Yiannis Georgiou, Philipp Gritsch, Patricia Grubel, Amal Gueroudji, Quentin Guilloteau, Carlo Hamalainen, Rolando Hong Enriquez, Lauren Huet, Kevin Hunter Kesling, Paula Iborra, Shiva Jahangiri, Jan Janssen, Joe Jordan, Sehrish Kanwal, Liliane Kunstmann, Fabian Lehmann, Ulf Leser, Chen Li, Peini Liu, Jakob Luettgau, Richard Lupat, Jose M. Fernandez, Ketan Maheshwari, Tanu Malik, Jack Marquez, Motohiko Matsuda, Doriana Medic, Somayeh Mohammadi, Alberto Mulone, John-Luke Navarro, Kin Wai Ng, Klaus Noelp, Bruno P. Kinoshita, Ryan Prout, Michael R. Crusoe, Sashko Ristov, Stefan Robila, Daniel Rosendo, Billy Rowell, Jedrzej Rybicki, Hector Sanchez, Nishant Saurabh, Sumit Kumar Saurav, Tom Scogland, Dinindu Senanayake, Woong Shin, Raul Sirvent, Tyler Skluzacek, Barry Sly-Delgado, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Abel Souza, Renan Souza, Domenico Talia, Nathan Tallent, Lauritz Thamsen, Mikhail Titov, Benjamin Tovar, Karan Vahi, Eric Vardar-Irrgang, Edite Vartina, Yuandou Wang, Merridee Wouters, Qi Yu, Ziad Al Bkhetan, Mahnoor Zulfiqar
The Workflows Community Summit gathered 111 participants from 18 countries to discuss emerging trends and challenges in scientific workflows, focusing on six key areas: time-sensitive workflows, AI-HPC convergence, multi-facility workflows, heterogeneous HPC environments, user experience, and FAIR computational workflows. The integration of AI and exascale computing has revolutionized scientific workflows, enabling higher-fidelity models and complex, time-sensitive processes, while introducing challenges in managing heterogeneous environments and multi-facility data dependencies. The rise of large language models is driving computational demands to zettaflop scales, necessitating modular, adaptable systems and cloud-service models to optimize resource utilization and ensure reproducibility. Multi-facility workflows present challenges in data movement, curation, and overcoming institutional silos, while diverse hardware architectures require integrating workflow considerations into early system design and developing standardized resource management tools. The summit emphasized improving user experience in workflow systems and ensuring FAIR workflows to enhance collaboration and accelerate scientific discovery. Key recommendations include developing standardized metrics for time-sensitive workflows, creating frameworks for cloud-HPC integration, implementing distributed-by-design workflow modeling, establishing multi-facility authentication protocols, and accelerating AI integration in HPC workflow management. The summit also called for comprehensive workflow benchmarks, workflow-specific UX principles, and a FAIR workflow maturity model, highlighting the need for continued collaboration in addressing the complex challenges posed by the convergence of AI, HPC, and multi-facility research environments.
Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Raees Khan, Kuan-Chieh Hsu, Ozgur O. Kilic, Paul Nilsson, Tatiana Korchuganova, David K. Park, Sankha Dutta, Yihui Ren, Joseph Boudreau, Tasnuva Chowdhury, Shengyu Feng, Jaehyung Kim, Scott Klasky, Tadashi Maeno, Verena Ingrid Martinez, Norbert Podhorszki, Frédéric Suter, Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo, Alexei Klimentov, Adolfy Hoisie
Large-scale distributed computing infrastructures such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) require comprehensive simulation tools for evaluating performance, testing new algorithms, and optimizing resource allocation strategies. However, existing simulators suffer from limited scalability, hardwired algorithms, lack of real-time monitoring, and inability to generate datasets suitable for modern machine learning approaches. We present CGSim, a simulation framework for large-scale distributed computing environments that addresses these limitations. Built upon the validated SimGrid simulation framework, CGSim provides high-level abstractions for modeling heterogeneous grid environments while maintaining accuracy and scalability. Key features include a modular plugin mechanism for testing custom workflow scheduling and data movement policies, interactive real-time visualization dashboards, and automatic generation of event-level datasets suitable for AI-assisted performance modeling. We demonstrate CGSim's capabilities through a comprehensive evaluation using production ATLAS PanDA workloads, showing significant calibration accuracy improvements across WLCG computing sites. Scalability experiments show near-linear scaling for multi-site simulations, with distributed workloads achieving 6x better performance compared to single-site execution. The framework enables researchers to simulate WLCG-scale infrastructures with hundreds of sites and thousands of concurrent jobs within practical time budget constraints on commodity hardware.
Tu Mai Anh Do, Loïc Pottier, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Frédéric Suter, Silvina Caíno-Lores, Michela Taufer, Ewa Deelman
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are widely used to study large-scale molecular systems. HPC systems are ideal platforms to run these studies, however, reaching the necessary simulation timescale to detect rare processes is challenging, even with modern supercomputers. To overcome the timescale limitation, the simulation of a long MD trajectory is replaced by multiple short-range simulations that are executed simultaneously in an ensemble of simulations. Analyses are usually co-scheduled with these simulations to efficiently process large volumes of data generated by the simulations at runtime, thanks to in situ techniques. Executing a workflow ensemble of simulations and their in situ analyses requires efficient co-scheduling strategies and sophisticated management of computational resources so that they are not slowing down each other. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to co-schedule simulations and in situ analyses such that the makespan of the workflow ensemble is minimized. We present a novel approach to allocate resources for a workflow ensemble under resource constraints by using a theoretical framework modeling the workflow ensemble's execution. We evaluate the proposed approach using an accurate simulator based on the WRENCH simulation framework on various workflow ensemble configurations. Results demonstrate the significance of co-scheduling simulations and in situ analyses that couple data together to benefit from data locality, in which inefficient scheduling decisions can lead up to a factor 30 slowdown in makespan.
Valentin Honoré, Tu Mai Anh Do, Loïc Pottier, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Ewa Deelman, Frédéric Suter
The amount of data generated by numerical simulations in various scientific domains such as molecular dynamics, climate modeling, biology, or astrophysics, led to a fundamental redesign of application workflows. The throughput and the capacity of storage subsystems have not evolved as fast as the computing power in extreme-scale supercomputers. As a result, the classical post-hoc analysis of simulation outputs became highly inefficient. In-situ workflows have then emerged as a solution in which simulation and data analytics are intertwined through shared computing resources, thus lower latencies. Determining the best allocation, i.e., how many resources to allocate to each component of an in-situ workflow; and mapping, i.e., where and at which frequency to run the data analytics component, is a complex task whose performance assessment is crucial to the efficient execution of in-situ workflows. However, such a performance evaluation of different allocation and mapping strategies usually relies either on directly running them on the targeted execution environments, which can rapidly become extremely time-and resource-consuming, or on resorting to the simulation of simplified models of the components of an in-situ workflow, which can lack of realism. In both cases, the validity of the performance evaluation is limited. To address this issue, we introduce SIM-SITU, a framework for the faithful simulation of in-situ workflows. This framework builds on the SimGrid toolkit and benefits of several important features of this versatile simulation tool. We designed SIM-SITU to reflect the typical structure of in-situ workflows and thanks to its modular design, SIM-SITU has the necessary flexibility to easily and faithfully evaluate the behavior and performance of various allocation and mapping strategies for in-situ workflows. We illustrate the simulation capabilities of SIM-SITU on a Molecular Dynamics use case. We study the impact of different allocation and mapping strategies on performance and show how users can leverage SIM-SITU to determine interesting tradeoffs when designing their in-situ workflow.
David K. Park, Yihui Ren, Ozgur O. Kilic, Tatiana Korchuganova, Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Joseph Boudreau, Tasnuva Chowdhury, Shengyu Feng, Raees Khan, Jaehyung Kim, Scott Klasky, Tadashi Maeno, Paul Nilsson, Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn, Norbert Podhorszki, Frederic Suter, Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo, Alexei Klimentov, Adolfy Hoisie
Large-scale international scientific collaborations, such as ATLAS, Belle II, CMS, and DUNE, generate vast volumes of data. These experiments necessitate substantial computational power for varied tasks, including structured data processing, Monte Carlo simulations, and end-user analysis. Centralized workflow and data management systems are employed to handle these demands, but current decision-making processes for data placement and payload allocation are often heuristic and disjointed. This optimization challenge potentially could be addressed using contemporary machine learning methods, such as reinforcement learning, which, in turn, require access to extensive data and an interactive environment. Instead, we propose a generative surrogate modeling approach to address the lack of training data and concerns about privacy preservation. We have collected and processed real-world job submission records, totaling more than two million jobs through 150 days, and applied four generative models for tabular data -- TVAE, CTAGGAN+, SMOTE, and TabDDPM -- to these datasets, thoroughly evaluating their performance. Along with measuring the discrepancy among feature-wise distributions separately, we also evaluate pair-wise feature correlations, distance to closest record, and responses to pre-trained models. Our experiments indicate that SMOTE and TabDDPM can generate similar tabular data, almost indistinguishable from the ground truth. Yet, as a non-learning method, SMOTE ranks the lowest in privacy preservation. As a result, we conclude that the probabilistic-diffusion-model-based TabDDPM is the most suitable generative model for managing job record data.
Tasnuva Chowdhury, Tadashi Maeno, Fatih Furkan Akman, Joseph Boudreau, Sankha Dutta, Shengyu Feng, Adolfy Hoisie, Kuan-Chieh Hsu, Raees Khan, Jaehyung Kim, Ozgur O. Kilic, Scott Klasky, Alexei Klimentov, Tatiana Korchuganova, Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn, Paul Nilsson, David K. Park, Norbert Podhorszki, Yihui Ren, John Rembrandt Steele, Frédéric Suter, Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Torre Wenaus, Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo
The collaborative efforts of large communities in science experiments, often comprising thousands of global members, reflect a monumental commitment to exploration and discovery. Recently, advanced and complex data processing has gained increasing importance in science experiments. Data processing workflows typically consist of multiple intricate steps, and the precise specification of resource requirements is crucial for each step to allocate optimal resources for effective processing. Estimating resource requirements in advance is challenging due to a wide range of analysis scenarios, varying skill levels among community members, and the continuously increasing spectrum of computing options. One practical approach to mitigate these challenges involves initially processing a subset of each step to measure precise resource utilization from actual processing profiles before completing the entire step. While this two-staged approach enables processing on optimal resources for most of the workflow, it has drawbacks such as initial inaccuracies leading to potential failures and suboptimal resource usage, along with overhead from waiting for initial processing completion, which is critical for fast-turnaround analyses. In this context, our study introduces a novel pipeline of machine learning models within a comprehensive workflow management system, the Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) system. These models employ advanced machine learning techniques to predict key resource requirements, overcoming challenges posed by limited upfront knowledge of characteristics at each step. Accurate forecasts of resource requirements enable informed and proactive decision-making in workflow management, enhancing the efficiency of handling diverse, complex workflows across heterogeneous resources.
Kuan-Chieh Hsu, Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Ozgur O. Kilic, Tatiana Korchuganova, Paul Nilsson, Sankha Dutta, Yihui Ren, David K. Park, Joseph Boudreau, Tasnuva Chowdhury, Shengyu Feng, Raees Khan, Jaehyung Kim, Scott Klasky, Tadashi Maeno, Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn, Norbert Podhorszki, Frédéric Suter, Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo, Alexei Klimentov, Adolfy Hoisie
Large-scale international collaborations such as ATLAS rely on globally distributed workflows and data management to process, move, and store vast volumes of data. ATLAS's Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) workflow system and the Rucio data management system are each highly optimized for their respective design goals. However, operating them together at global scale exposes systemic inefficiencies, including underutilized resources, redundant or unnecessary transfers, and altered error distributions. Moreover, PanDA and Rucio currently lack shared performance awareness and coordinated, adaptive strategies. This work charts a path toward co-optimizing the two systems by diagnosing data-management pitfalls and prioritizing end-to-end improvements. With the observation of spatially and temporally imbalanced transfer activities, we develop a metadata-matching algorithm that links PanDA jobs and Rucio datasets at the file level, yielding a complete, fine-grained view of data access and movement. Using this linkage, we identify anomalous transfer patterns that violate PanDA's data-centric job-allocation principle. We then outline mitigation strategies for these patterns and highlight opportunities for tighter PanDA-Rucio coordination to improve resource utilization, reduce unnecessary data movement, and enhance overall system resilience.
Valentin Honoré, Bertrand Simon, Frédéric Suter
Magnetic tapes are often considered as an outdated storage technology, yet they are still used to store huge amounts of data. Their main interests are a large capacity and a low price per gigabyte, which come at the cost of a much larger file access time than on disks. With tapes, finding the right ordering of multiple file accesses is thus key to performance. Moving the reading head back and forth along a kilometer long tape has a non-negligible cost and unnecessary movements thus have to be avoided. However, the optimization of tape request ordering has then rarely been studied in the scheduling literature, much less than I/O scheduling on disks. For instance, minimizing the average service time for several read requests on a linear tape remains an open question. Therefore, in this paper, we aim at improving the quality of service experienced by users of tape storage systems, and not only the peak performance of such systems. To this end, we propose a reasonable polynomial-time exact algorithm while this problem and simpler variants have been conjectured NP-hard. We also refine the proposed model by considering U-turn penalty costs accounting for inherent mechanical accelerations. Then, we propose low-cost variants of our optimal algorithm by restricting the solution space, yet still yielding an accurate suboptimal solution. Finally, we compare our algorithms to existing solutions from the literature on logs of the mass storage management system of a major datacenter. This allows us to assess the quality of previous solutions and the improvement achieved by our low-cost algorithms. Aiming for reproducibility, we make available the complete implementation of the algorithms used in our evaluation, alongside the dataset of tape requests that is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind to be publicly released.
Tainã Coleman, Henri Casanova, Ketan Maheshwari, Loïc Pottier, Sean R. Wilkinson, Justin Wozniak, Frédéric Suter, Mallikarjun Shankar, Rafael Ferreira da Silva
The prevalence of scientific workflows with high computational demands calls for their execution on various distributed computing platforms, including large-scale leadership-class high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. To handle the deployment, monitoring, and optimization of workflow executions, many workflow systems have been developed over the past decade. There is a need for workflow benchmarks that can be used to evaluate the performance of workflow systems on current and future software stacks and hardware platforms. We present a generator of realistic workflow benchmark specifications that can be translated into benchmark code to be executed with current workflow systems. Our approach generates workflow tasks with arbitrary performance characteristics (CPU, memory, and I/O usage) and with realistic task dependency structures based on those seen in production workflows. We present experimental results that show that our approach generates benchmarks that are representative of production workflows, and conduct a case study to demonstrate the use and usefulness of our generated benchmarks to evaluate the performance of workflow systems under different configuration scenarios.
Woong Shin, Renan Souza, Daniel Rosendo, Frédéric Suter, Feiyi Wang, Prasanna Balaprakash, Rafael Ferreira da Silva
Modern scientific discovery increasingly requires coordinating distributed facilities and heterogeneous resources, forcing researchers to act as manual workflow coordinators rather than scientists. Advances in AI leading to AI agents show exciting new opportunities that can accelerate scientific discovery by providing intelligence as a component in the ecosystem. However, it is unclear how this new capability would materialize and integrate in the real world. To address this, we propose a conceptual framework where workflows evolve along two dimensions which are intelligence (from static to intelligent) and composition (from single to swarm) to chart an evolutionary path from current workflow management systems to fully autonomous, distributed scientific laboratories. With these trajectories in mind, we present an architectural blueprint that can help the community take the next steps towards harnessing the opportunities in autonomous science with the potential for 100x discovery acceleration and transformational scientific workflows.
Jesse McDonald, Maximilian Horzela, Frédéric Suter, Henri Casanova
Many parallel and distributed computing research results are obtained in simulation, using simulators that mimic real-world executions on some target system. Each such simulator is configured by picking values for parameters that define the behavior of the underlying simulation models it implements. The main concern for a simulator is accuracy: simulated behaviors should be as close as possible to those observed in the real-world target system. This requires that values for each of the simulator's parameters be carefully picked, or "calibrated," based on ground-truth real-world executions. Examining the current state of the art shows that simulator calibration, at least in the field of parallel and distributed computing, is often undocumented (and thus perhaps often not performed) and, when documented, is described as a labor-intensive, manual process. In this work we evaluate the benefit of automating simulation calibration using simple algorithms. Specifically, we use a real-world case study from the field of High Energy Physics and compare automated calibration to calibration performed by a domain scientist. Our main finding is that automated calibration is on par with or significantly outperforms the calibration performed by the domain scientist. Furthermore, automated calibration makes it straightforward to operate desirable trade-offs between simulation accuracy and simulation speed.
Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Rosa M. Badia, Venkat Bala, Debbie Bard, Peer-Timo Bremer, Ian Buckley, Silvina Caino-Lores, Kyle Chard, Carole Goble, Shantenu Jha, Daniel S. Katz, Daniel Laney, Manish Parashar, Frederic Suter, Nick Tyler, Thomas Uram, Ilkay Altintas, Stefan Andersson, William Arndt, Juan Aznar, Jonathan Bader, Bartosz Balis, Chris Blanton, Kelly Rosa Braghetto, Aharon Brodutch, Paul Brunk, Henri Casanova, Alba Cervera Lierta, Justin Chigu, Taina Coleman, Nick Collier, Iacopo Colonnelli, Frederik Coppens, Michael Crusoe, Will Cunningham, Bruno de Paula Kinoshita, Paolo Di Tommaso, Charles Doutriaux, Matthew Downton, Wael Elwasif, Bjoern Enders, Chris Erdmann, Thomas Fahringer, Ludmilla Figueiredo, Rosa Filgueira, Martin Foltin, Anne Fouilloux, Luiz Gadelha, Andy Gallo, Artur Garcia Saez, Daniel Garijo, Roman Gerlach, Ryan Grant, Samuel Grayson, Patricia Grubel, Johan Gustafsson, Valerie Hayot-Sasson, Oscar Hernandez, Marcus Hilbrich, AnnMary Justine, Ian Laflotte, Fabian Lehmann, Andre Luckow, Jakob Luettgau, Ketan Maheshwari, Motohiko Matsuda, Doriana Medic, Pete Mendygral, Marek Michalewicz, Jorji Nonaka, Maciej Pawlik, Loic Pottier, Line Pouchard, Mathias Putz, Santosh Kumar Radha, Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Sashko Ristov, Paul Romano, Daniel Rosendo, Martin Ruefenacht, Katarzyna Rycerz, Nishant Saurabh, Volodymyr Savchenko, Martin Schulz, Christine Simpson, Raul Sirvent, Tyler Skluzacek, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Renan Souza, Sreenivas Rangan Sukumar, Ziheng Sun, Alan Sussman, Douglas Thain, Mikhail Titov, Benjamin Tovar, Aalap Tripathy, Matteo Turilli, Bartosz Tuznik, Hubertus van Dam, Aurelio Vivas, Logan Ward, Patrick Widener, Sean Wilkinson, Justyna Zawalska, Mahnoor Zulfiqar
Scientific workflows have become integral tools in broad scientific computing use cases. Science discovery is increasingly dependent on workflows to orchestrate large and complex scientific experiments that range from execution of a cloud-based data preprocessing pipeline to multi-facility instrument-to-edge-to-HPC computational workflows. Given the changing landscape of scientific computing and the evolving needs of emerging scientific applications, it is paramount that the development of novel scientific workflows and system functionalities seek to increase the efficiency, resilience, and pervasiveness of existing systems and applications. Specifically, the proliferation of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) workflows, need for processing large scale datasets produced by instruments at the edge, intensification of near real-time data processing, support for long-term experiment campaigns, and emergence of quantum computing as an adjunct to HPC, have significantly changed the functional and operational requirements of workflow systems. Workflow systems now need to, for example, support data streams from the edge-to-cloud-to-HPC enable the management of many small-sized files, allow data reduction while ensuring high accuracy, orchestrate distributed services (workflows, instruments, data movement, provenance, publication, etc.) across computing and user facilities, among others. Further, to accelerate science, it is also necessary that these systems implement specifications/standards and APIs for seamless (horizontal and vertical) integration between systems and applications, as well as enabling the publication of workflows and their associated products according to the FAIR principles. This document reports on discussions and findings from the 2022 international edition of the Workflows Community Summit that took place on November 29 and 30, 2022.
Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Henri Casanova, Kyle Chard, Tainã Coleman, Dan Laney, Dong Ahn, Shantenu Jha, Dorran Howell, Stian Soiland-Reys, Ilkay Altintas, Douglas Thain, Rosa Filgueira, Yadu Babuji, Rosa M. Badia, Bartosz Balis, Silvina Caino-Lores, Scott Callaghan, Frederik Coppens, Michael R. Crusoe, Kaushik De, Frank Di Natale, Tu M. A. Do, Bjoern Enders, Thomas Fahringer, Anne Fouilloux, Grigori Fursin, Alban Gaignard, Alex Ganose, Daniel Garijo, Sandra Gesing, Carole Goble, Adil Hasan, Sebastiaan Huber, Daniel S. Katz, Ulf Leser, Douglas Lowe, Bertram Ludaescher, Ketan Maheshwari, Maciej Malawski, Rajiv Mayani, Kshitij Mehta, Andre Merzky, Todd Munson, Jonathan Ozik, Loïc Pottier, Sashko Ristov, Mehdi Roozmeh, Renan Souza, Frédéric Suter, Benjamin Tovar, Matteo Turilli, Karan Vahi, Alvaro Vidal-Torreira, Wendy Whitcup, Michael Wilde, Alan Williams, Matthew Wolf, Justin Wozniak
Scientific workflows are a cornerstone of modern scientific computing, and they have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the last decade. Many of these workflows have high computational, storage, and/or communication demands, and thus must execute on a wide range of large-scale platforms, from large clouds to upcoming exascale HPC platforms. Workflows will play a crucial role in the data-oriented and post-Moore's computing landscape as they democratize the application of cutting-edge research techniques, computationally intensive methods, and use of new computing platforms. As workflows continue to be adopted by scientific projects and user communities, they are becoming more complex. Workflows are increasingly composed of tasks that perform computations such as short machine learning inference, multi-node simulations, long-running machine learning model training, amongst others, and thus increasingly rely on heterogeneous architectures that include CPUs but also GPUs and accelerators. The workflow management system (WMS) technology landscape is currently segmented and presents significant barriers to entry due to the hundreds of seemingly comparable, yet incompatible, systems that exist. Another fundamental problem is that there are conflicting theoretical bases and abstractions for a WMS. Systems that use the same underlying abstractions can likely be translated between, which is not the case for systems that use different abstractions. More information: https://workflowsri.org/summits/technical