plan for ggf9 in chicago

[Dennis Gannon <gannon@cs.indiana.edu>]

hi GCE research group members.

At our last meeting we agreed to focus our efforts on workflow related
research and we decided to start with two workshop.  however, the there
was already a full filed of workshops and the life-sciences group is
already planning a workhsop for ggf9 with a big focus on this area.
Hence, we  have decided to focus our attention on a combine our plans
for two workshops into one.  at the end of this message is a proposal
for a ggf10 workshop on workflow that we have sent to the Grid Research
Oversight Committee.

For our meeting in chicago (Monday Oct 6, 2-3:30 pm, Mayfair room) we will
1. 2:00-2:30 Discuss the workshop plan.  who to invite. distribute the
call for papers.  establish a program committee.
2. 2:30-3:30 Discuss the report on portals and portlets.  The draft report
is available at:
https://forge.gridforum.org/docman2/ViewProperties.php?group_id=90&document_content_id=864
This document is still a draft and we are looking for contributions!

see you at ggf!
dennis gannon
Geoffrey Fox
Mary Thomas
---------------------------------


GGF10 GCE Workflow Meeting
--------------------------
 Workflow is a critical part of the emerging Grid Computing Environments
 and captures the linkage of constituent services together in a
 hierarchical fashion to build larger composite services. Workflow
 captures "programming the Web or Grid" and encompasses a broad range of
 approaches with names like "Service Orchestration", "Service or Process
 Coordination", "Service Conversation", "Web or Grid Scripting",
 "Application Integration", or "Software Bus". One can identify at least
 four important aspects of workflow
 1) User Environments or Workflow IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
 2) Representation and language to express workflow
 3) Translation or compilation
 4) Runtime
 Workflow overlaps with areas such as "distributed system programming" and
 "virtual data".

 The GCE workshop will build on two related workshops in this area
 a) GGF9 Life Sciences workshop
 b) UK e-Science December 2003 workshop at Edinburgh
 The first is focussed on identifying key requirements for Life Science
 Grids while the second has a UK flavor.

 We suggest that workflow is a relatively immature field and it is
 necessary to gain experience with several different approaches to several
 different applications. One goal of the GGF10 workshop will be to collect
 a set of exemplar applications and their requirements generalizing the
 Life Science meeting which is gathering requirements in their application
 area. This could lead to either a "pencil and paper" or "real code"
 collection of workflow benchmarks. Given the diversity of service and
 workflow models one central task will be to reach consensus on what such
 a benchmark set could look like in terms of both features covered and the
 methods of representing the benchmarks.

 The meeting will have a mix of invited and contributed papers and will
 conclude with a panel on "Towards a Workflow Benchmark Suite". The
 meeting and panel conclusions will be summarized in a GGF informational
 document. Speakers will be invited to submit a paper for a Special Issue
 of Concurrency&Computation: Practice&Experience".

 If approved by GGF, we will issue a CFP and discuss briefly at GCE
 meeting at GGF9. Invited talks could include both specific workflow
 projects and

1) Summary of Life Science and Edinburgh Meetings
2) Presentation(s) of commercial state of the art (IBM, Microsoft, HP ...)
3) Presentation from Advanced Programming Model RG on relationship to distributed systems
4) Presentation on Virtual Data
5) Presentation on "Why are we discussing this; it has all been solved by Python, Perl, Matlab, Mathematica ...."
6) Some "unbiased" review of the field