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At least 37 records · Page 2

Scientific Data Management Beyond Traditional Computing Boundaries

Scientific data management is undergoing a fundamental transformation driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning workflows, distributed computing and storage environments, and exponential data growth. Here, we analyze how these developments address current limitations while enabling new capabilities for cross-facility collaboration and AI-driven research.

Widener, Patrick [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (O↗

ASCEM Data Brower (ASCEMDB) v0.8

Data management tool designed for the Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM) framework. Distinguishing features of this gateway include: (1) handling of complex geometry data, (2) advance selection mechanism, (3) state of art rendering of spatiotemporal data records, and (4) seamless integration with a distributed workflow engine.

Romosan, Alexandru↗

An Executable Choreography Framework for Dynamic Service-Oriented Architectures

Interoperability and loose coupling requirements are pushing the next generation of distributed applications towards more decentralized and more dynamic interaction schemes, which the classic requestJresponse communication paradigm can hardly accommodate. Hence, sound foundations and mechanisms for the establishment of unmticiptitteb peer-to-peer interactions across organizational boundaries are of significant importance to upcoming middleware platforms. The Executable Choreography Framework (ECF) is a middleware-level framework that targets dynamic and decentralized service compositions. The ECF combines transparent context propagation with aspect-oriented software composition techniques to dynamically refine the default control and data flow of service invocations. The framework provides a ground for experimentation with dynamic and distributed workflows, and a base to assess their safety and applicability when depioyed across organizational boundaries.

Akkawi, Faisal↗

Provenance in Data Interoperability for Multi-Sensor Intercomparison

As our inventory of Earth science data sets grows, the ability to compare, merge and fuse multiple datasets grows in importance. This requires a deeper data interoperability than we have now. Efforts such as Open Geospatial Consortium and OPeNDAP (Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol) have broken down format barriers to interoperability; the next challenge is the semantic aspects of the data. Consider the issues when satellite data are merged, cross-calibrated, validated, inter-compared and fused. We must match up data sets that are related, yet different in significant ways: the phenomenon being measured, measurement technique, location in space-time or quality of the measurements. If subtle distinctions between similar measurements are not clear to the user, results can be meaningless or lead to an incorrect interpretation of the data. Most of these distinctions trace to how the data came to be: sensors, processing and quality assessment. For example, monthly averages of satellite-based aerosol measurements often show significant discrepancies, which might be due to differences in spatio- temporal aggregation, sampling issues, sensor biases, algorithm differences or calibration issues. Provenance information must be captured in a semantic framework that allows data inter-use tools to incorporate it and aid in the intervention of comparison or merged products. Semantic web technology allows us to encode our knowledge of measurement characteristics, phenomena measured, space-time representation, and data quality attributes in a well-structured, machine-readable ontology and rulesets. An analysis tool can use this knowledge to show users the provenance-related distrintions between two variables, advising on options for further data processing and analysis. An additional problem for workflows distributed across heterogeneous systems is retrieval and transport of provenance. Provenance may be either embedded within the data payload, or transmitted from server to client in an out-of-band mechanism. The out of band mechanism is more flexible in the richness of provenance information that can be accomodated, but it relies on a persistent framework and can be difficult for legacy clients to use. We are prototyping the embedded model, incorporating provenance within metadata objects in the data payload. Thus, it always remains with the data. The downside is a limit to the size of provenance metadata that we can include, an issue that will eventually need resolution to encompass the richness of provenance information required for daata intercomparison and merging.

Lynnes, Chris↗

iDDS: intelligent distributed dispatch and scheduling for workflow orchestration

The intelligent distributed dispatch and scheduling (iDDS) service is a versatile workflow orchestration system designed for large-scale, distributed scientific computing. iDDS extends traditional workload and data management by integrating data-aware execution, conditional logic, and programmable workflows, enabling automation of complex and dynamic processing pipelines. Originally developed for the ATLAS experiment at the large hadron collider, iDDS has evolved into an experiment-agnostic platform that supports both template-driven workflows and a Function-as-a-Task model for Python-based orchestration. This paper presents the architecture and core components of iDDS, highlighting its scalability, modular message-driven design, and integration with systems such as PanDA and Rucio. We demonstrate its versatility through real-world use cases: fine-grained tape resource optimization for ATLAS, orchestration of large Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) workflows for the Rubin Observatory, distributed hyperparameter optimization for machine learning applications, active learning for physics analyses, and AI-assisted detector design at the electron–ion collider. By unifying workload scheduling, data movement, and adaptive decision-making, iDDS reduces operational overhead and enables reproducible, high-throughput workflows across heterogeneous infrastructures. We conclude with current challenges and future directions, including interactive, cloud-native, and serverless workflow support.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SWARM: Reimagining scientific workflow management systems in a distributed world

Modern scientific workflows process massive amounts of data from diverse instruments and sensors, leveraging geographically distributed, heterogeneous compute and storage resources—from leadership-class systems to edge devices—connected by high-performance networks. The diversity of resources introduces challenges in harnessing their full potential, with resilience issues arising across applications, system software, networks, storage, and hardware. Today, workflow management systems (WMS) coordinate the execution of computation and data management tasks across target resources. However, WMS’s centralized nature makes them vulnerable to faults and scalability issues that may result in failures of entire computational campaigns. In conclusion, this paper introduces a novel agentic framework for workflow management, fully distributing and decentralizing the WMS functions and modeling them as swarm intelligence agents infused with advanced artificial intelligence solutions and traditional distributed computing algorithms that can make coordinated decisions in the presence of failures of the underlying cyberinfrastructure.

Swarm intelligence↗

Building a Wide-Area File Transfer Performance Predictor: An Empirical Study

Wide-area data transfer is central to geographically distributed scientific workflows. Faster delivery of data is important for these workflows. Predictability is equally (or even more) important. With the goal of providing a reasonably accurate estimate of data transfer time to improve resource allocation & scheduling for workflows and enable end-to-end data transfer optimization, we apply machine learning methods to develop predictive models for data transfer times over a variety of wide area networks. To build and evaluate these models, we use 201,388 transfers, involving 759 million files totaling 9 PB transferred, over 115 heavily used source-destination pairs (“edges”) between 135 unique endpoints. We evaluate the models for different retraining frequencies and different window size of history data. In the best case, the resulting models have a median prediction error of ≤21% for 50% of the edges, and ≤32% for 75% of the edges. We present a detailed analysis of these results that provides insights into the cause of some of the high errors. We envision that the performance predictor will be informative for scheduling geo-distributed workflows. The insights also suggest obvious directions for both further analysis and transfer service optimization.

Liu, Zhengchun↗

Privacy by Design in Distributed Edge Systems: Innovating Secure Workflows for Smart Cities

The proliferation of distributed edge systems, such as those in smart cities, healthcare, and industrial IoT, offers unprecedented opportunities for data processing closer to its source, thereby reducing latency and enhancing efficiency. However, these systems also present significant privacy challenges due to the handling of sensitive data from multiple sources. This article explores the critical need for designing privacy-preserving workflows in distributed edge systems to ensure data security while maximizing the potential of edge computing. By examining the challenges, technological advancements, and potential of privacy-by-design approaches, we highlight the importance of integrating advanced privacy-preserving techniques like federated learning, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs. These innovations are crucial for enhancing data security, regulatory compliance, and public trust in smart city applications, ultimately leading to safer and more efficient urban environments.

Kotevska, Olivera↗

Object Proxy Patterns for Accelerating Distributed Applications

Workflow and serverless frameworks have empowered new approaches to distributed application design by abstracting compute resources. However, their typically limited or one-size-fits-all support for advanced data flow patterns leaves optimization to the application programmer—optimization that becomes more difficult as data become larger. The transparent object proxy, which provides wide-area references that can resolve to data regardless of location, has been demonstrated as an effective low-level building block in such situations. Here we propose three high-level proxy-based programming patterns—distributed futures, streaming, and ownership—that make the power of the proxy pattern usable for more complex and dynamic distributed program structures. We motivate these patterns via careful review of application requirements and describe implementations of each pattern. As a result, we evaluate our implementations through a suite of benchmarks and by applying them in three meaningful scientific applications, in which we demonstrate substantial improvements in runtime, throughput, and memory usage.

Distributed Computing↗

Characterizing, Modeling, and Accurately Simulating Power and Energy Consumption of I/O-intensive Scientific Workflows

While distributed computing infrastructures can provide infrastructure-level techniques for managing energy consumption, application-level energy consumption models have also been developed to support energy-efficient scheduling and resource provisioning algorithms. In this work, we analyze the accuracy of a widely-used application-level model that has been developed and used in the context of scientific workflow executions. To this end, we profile two production scientific workflows on a distributed platform instrumented with power meters. We then conduct an analysis of power and energy consumption measurements. This analysis shows that power consumption is not linearly related to CPU utilization and that I/O operations significantly impact power, and thus energy, consumption. We then propose a power consumption model that accounts for I/O operations, including the impact of waiting for these operations to complete, and for concurrent task executions on multi-socket, multi-core compute nodes. We implement our proposed model as part of a simulator that allows us to draw direct comparisons between real-world and modeled power and energy consumption. Here, we find that our model has high accuracy when compared to real-world executions. Furthermore, our model improves accuracy by about two orders of magnitude when compared to the traditional models used in the energy-efficient workflow scheduling literature.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Performance Characterization and Provenance of Distributed Task-based Workflows on HPC Platforms

Understanding performance and provenance of task-based workflows poses significant challenges, particularly in distributed configurations where resources are shared by multiple applications. Task-based workflow management systems further complicate performance predictability because of their dynamicity that subtly alters task execution order from run to run. In this paper we propose a layered characterization framework for performance and task provenance for Dask.distributed workflows running on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. It collects data from jobs, the workflow management system, and the operating system to aid in understanding the performance of these workflows. Our approach encompasses three main contributions: first, an extension of Dask.distributed to capture high-fidelity task provenance using Mochi data services; second, the adaptation of the established HPC I/O characterization tool Darshan to gather high-fidelity I/O data, thereby enhancing the granularity of our analysis; and third, a framework to combine and process the collected data and provide helpful insights into performance characterization and reproducibility, alongside our lessons learned.

Dask↗

Tachyon: Intelligent Multi-Scale Modeling of Distributed Resilient Infrastructure and Workflows for Data Intensive HEP Analyses

The DOE High Energy Physics (HEP) program in Neutrino and Collider science drives data-intensive science and simulation on extreme-scale platforms. Modeling and optimizing the complex distributed components from experimental to leadership computing facilities are essential for HEP workflows to achieve required response times and resilience under various conditions. Tachyon proposes a framework for scalable modeling, simulation, and validation of key performance characteristics for the distributed infrastructure between FNAL and ALCF, along with associated HEP workflows.

Carothers, Chris [Rensselaer Poly.]↗

Tachyon: Intelligent Multi-Scale Modeling of Distributed Resilient Infrastructure and Workflows for Data Intensive HEP Analyses

The DOE High Energy Physics (HEP) program in Neutrino and Collider science drives data-intensive science and simulation on extreme-scale platforms. Modeling and optimizing the complex distributed components from experimental to leadership computing facilities are essential for HEP workflows to achieve required response times and resilience under various conditions. Tachyon proposes a framework for scalable modeling, simulation, and validation of key performance characteristics for the distributed infrastructure between FNAL and ALCF, along with associated HEP workflows.

Carothers, Chris [Rensselaer Poly.]↗

Preparation of the Multi-Site Data Processing at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera is scheduled to start taking data in the summer of 2025. The Data Release Production will run the LSST Science Pipe software at data facilities in the US, France and the UK. The LSST Science Pipeline consists of complex directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. Rubin will use the Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) workflow and workload management system to orchestrate this complex workflow and the distribution of workloads to the data facilities. When run end-to-end by a team of data production staff, this processing (the Science Pipelines, distributed by the workflow and workload management system) is referred to as a 'campaign'. This paper describes the central services and data facility specific services that support this multi-site data process model, including the service deployment infrastructure, the workload and workflow system, the Campaign Management tools, and connection to Rubin Data Management. This paper will also mention the experience of processing the Rubin Commissioning Camera data. All these are part of the effort to scale up the processing capabilities for the expected very large data volume from the LSST Camera.

Yang, Wei [SLAC]↗

Toward designing effective exascale scientific computing workflows: experiences and best practices

Many fields within scientific computing have embraced advances in big-data analysis and machine learning, which often requires the deployment of large, distributed and complicated workflows that may combine training neural networks, performing simulations, running inference, and performing database queries and data analysis in asynchronous, parallel and pipelined execution frameworks. Such a shift has brought into focus the need for scalable, efficient workflow management solutions with reproducibility, error and provenance handling, traceability, and checkpoint-restart capabilities, among other needs. Here, we discuss challenges and best-practices for deploying exascale-generation computational science workflows on resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). We present our experiences with large-scale deployment of distributed workflows on the Summit supercomputer, including for bioinformatics and computational biophysics, materials science, and deep learning model optimization. We also present problems and solutions created by working within a Python-centric software base on traditional HPC systems, and discuss steps that will be required before the convergence of HPC, AI, and data science can be fully realized. Our results point to a wealth of exciting new possibilities for harnessing this convergence to tackle new scientific challenges.

Coletti, Mark↗

Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) for the HyspIRI Spectrometer Mission

The OSSE software provides an integrated end-to-end environment to simulate an Earth observing system by iteratively running a distributed modeling workflow based on the HyspIRI Mission, including atmospheric radiative transfer, surface albedo effects, detection, and retrieval for agile exploration of the mission design space. The software enables an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) and can be used for design trade space exploration of science return for proposed instruments by modeling the whole ground truth, sensing, and retrieval chain and to assess retrieval accuracy for a particular instrument and algorithm design. The OSSE in fra struc ture is extensible to future National Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey concept missions where integrated modeling can improve the fidelity of coupled science and engineering analyses for systematic analysis and science return studies. This software has a distributed architecture that gives it a distinct advantage over other similar efforts. The workflow modeling components are typically legacy computer programs implemented in a variety of programming languages, including MATLAB, Excel, and FORTRAN. Integration of these diverse components is difficult and time-consuming. In order to hide this complexity, each modeling component is wrapped as a Web Service, and each component is able to pass analysis parameterizations, such as reflectance or radiance spectra, on to the next component downstream in the service workflow chain. In this way, the interface to each modeling component becomes uniform and the entire end-to-end workflow can be run using any existing or custom workflow processing engine. The architecture lets users extend workflows as new modeling components become available, chain together the components using any existing or custom workflow processing engine, and distribute them across any Internet-accessible Web Service endpoints. The workflow components can be hosted on any Internet-accessible machine. This has the advantages that the computations can be distributed to make best use of the available computing resources, and each workflow component can be hosted and maintained by their respective domain experts.

Turmon, Michael J.↗

Integrating prediction, provenance, and optimization into high energy workflows

We propose a novel approach for efficient execution of workflows on distributed resources. The key components of this framework include: performance modeling to quantitatively predict workflow component behavior; optimization-based scheduling such as choosing an optimal subset of resources to meet demand and assignment of tasks to resources; distributed I/O optimizations such as prefetching; and provenance methods for collecting performance data. In preliminary results, these techniques improve throughput on a small Belle II workflow by 20%.

Schram, M.↗