PNNL

Abstract

A context-aware scientific workflow is a typical scientific workflow that is enhanced with context binding and awareness mechanisms. Context facilitates further configuration of the scientific workflow at runtime such that it is tuned to its environment during execution and responds intelligently based on such awareness without customized coding of the workflow. In this paper, we present a context annotation framework, which supports rapid development of context-aware scientific workflows. Context annotation enables a diverse type of actor in Kepler that may bind with different sensed environmental information as part of the actor’s regular data. Context-aware actors simplify the construction of scientific workflows that require intricate knowledge in initializing and configuring a large number of parameters to cover all different execution conditions. This paper presents the motivation, system design, implementation, and usage of context annotation in relation to the Kepler scientific workflow system.