Workflow-based Services: Infrastructure for Scientific Applications

The way scientists work in traditional sciences has changed drastically in recent years. Computer science is increasingly supporting them in performing and analyzing their experiments. No longer is the data analyzed on paper or with simple computational tools. Instead, massive amounts of data obtained from instruments are processed in complex computational pipelines modeled as workflows. This trend of supporting traditional sciences with computational tools has lead to a significant speedup in executing experiments and has also enabled experiments which would not have been possible before. The work presented in this book addresses some of the challenges involved in providing scientists with adequate infrastructure to execute such experiments.