Cyber-Integrator: A Highly Interactive Scientific Process Management Environment.

Rob Kooper, Luigi Marini, Jim Myers and Peter Bajcsy

2008 NCSA Private Sector (PSP) Annual Meeting, May 12-14, NCSA, Illinois (2008)

This poster and live demonstration will present a novel process management environment called CyberIntegrator to support diverse exploratory analyses, and to facilitate transitions from desktop executions to high-performance computing executions. The exploratory analyses are very human time consuming and hard to reproduce because of the lack of in-silico scientific process management and because of the diversity of data, software and computational requirements. The desktop executions are many times very difficult for domain scientists to scale to large volumes of data or to computations requiring high-performance computing resources. The motivation for our work comes from the need to build the next generation of in-silico scientific discovery processes that require (a) access to heterogeneous and distributed data and computational resources, (b) integration of heterogeneous software packages, tools and services, (c) formation and execution of complex analytical processing sequences, (d) preservation of traces about scientific analyses and (e) design of secure collaborative Web-based frameworks for sharing information and resources.

The goal of the presented work is to describe a modular architecture and key features of a workflow that provides a process management environment for automating science processes, reducing the human time involved and enabling scientific discoveries that would not be possible without supporting software and hardware infrastructure. The demonstration will allow users to include various data sets and tools into the environment, link tools into workflows, annotate data/tools/workflows, execute the tools and visualize the workflow process, data/tool/workflow annotations and self-describing metadata about exploratory activities.