A Demonstration of the SciFlo Grid Workflow Engine

SciFlo is a system for Scientific Knowledge Creation on the Grid using a Semantically-Enabled Dataflow Execution Environment. SciFlo leverages Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web Services and the Grid Computing standards (WS-* & Globus Alliance toolkits), and enables scientists to do multi-instrument Earth Science by assembling reusable Web Services and native executables into a distributed computing flow (operator graph). SciFlo’s XML dataflow documents can be a mixture of concrete operators (fully bound operations) and abstract template operators (late binding via semantic lookup). All data objects and operators can be both simply typed (simple and complex types in XML schema) and semantically typed (linked to OWL ontologies). We will demonstrate a version of the SciFlo workflow engine executing a variety of workflow documents. [Note: This document is a quick description of the proposed demo, not a fully referenced and defended paper.]