Leveraging Windows Workflow Foundation for Scientific Workflows in Wind Tunnel Applications

Abstract

Scientific and engineering experiments often produce large volumes of data that must be processed and visualised in near-realtime. An example of this, described in this paper, is microphone array processing of data from wind tunnels for aeroacoustic measurements. The overall turnaround time from data acquisition and movement, to data processing and visualization is often inhibited by factors such as manual data movement, system interoperability issues, manual resource discovery for job scheduling, and disparate physical locality between the experiment and scientist or engineer post-event. Workflow frameworks and runtimes can enable rapid composition and execution of complex scientific workflows. In this paper we explore two approaches based on Windows Workflow Foundation, a component of Microsoft WinFX. In our first approach, we present a framework for users to compose sequential workflows and access Globus grid services seamlessly using a .NET-based Commodity Grid Toolkit (MyCoG.NET). We demonstrate how application specific activity sets can be developed and extended by users. In our second approach we highlight how it can be advantageous to keep databases as central to the complete workflow enactment. These two approaches are demonstrated in the context of a wind tunnel Grid system being developed to help experimental aerodynamicists orchestrate such workflows.