Provenance Component Published

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2012 No comments

The e-Science Central team presented the first version of the Workflow Provenance Component at WORKS 11.  The component allows viewing of the history of an artifact (data, image, etc.) in terms of which workflow blocks and data artifacts have been involved in its creation.  Further, users can choose to recreate the artifact having updated each workflow block to the latest version.  There are two uses for this: firstly,  if a bug is found in a workflow block, we can automatically regenerate affected data and compare it to the original version.  Secondly, we can generate dynamic workflows to process new data within our Drug Discovery work.

S. Woodman, H. Hiden, P. Watson,  P. Missier Achieving Reproducibility by Combining Provenance with Service and Workflow Versioning. In: The 6th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science. 2011, Seattle

Best Paper at IEEE Cloud Com 2011

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2012 No comments

We are delighted to announce that Paul Watson’s paper A Multi-Level Security Model for Partitioning Workflows over Federated Clouds has been awarded the Best Paper award at the IEEE Cloud Com 2011.

Cloud Futures 2011

Posted by Simon on June 8, 2011 No comments

Paul Watson presented e-Science Central at the Microsoft Cloud Futures conference in Redmond last week.

“The Cloud Futures Workshop series brings together thought leaders from academia, industry, and government to discuss the role of cloud computing across a variety of research and educational areas—including computer science, earth sciences, healthcare, humanities, life sciences, and social sciences. Presentations and discussions will highlight how new techniques, software platforms, and methods of research and teaching in the cloud may solve distinct challenges arising in those diverse areas.”

Paul’s slides are available.

Update: The video is now available (skip to 33mins)

Maven Workflow Blocks

Posted by Simon on May 18, 2011 No comments

It is now possible to create workflow blocks from an Apache Maven project using your favourite IDE and then upload them automatically into e-Science Central.  These instructions assume that you’re comfortable running command line applications but there are equivalent methods in most IDEs.

To create a Java block:

1. Run the following command to create a new Maven project for a Java block

mvn archetype:generate				\
 -DarchetypeGroupId=com.connexience             \
 -DarchetypeArtifactId=workflow-block-java      \
 -DarchetypeVersion=1.0				\
 -DgroupId=sjw.test                             \
 -DartifactId=helloWorldJava 			\
 -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT				\
 -DarchetypeRepository=http://www.esciencecentral.co.uk/archiva/repository/internal

You will need to replace the values for groupId and artifactId. This will create you a blank Java Workflow block that you can edit. The source code is src/main/java/MyService.java

2. Subscribe to the Uploading application in e-ScienceCentral and give it all the permisions (tick all the boxes)

3. Create the file $USER_HOME/.inkspot/maven.props and paste in the following contents. This will allow Maven to upload your new block into e-Science Central. You will need to edit the username and password but leave the other fields as they are. Alternatively, you can set the values directly in the project’s pom.xml

serverURL=http://esciencecentral.co.uk/APIServer
username=
password=
appId=402880852de18993012f01e8750b55ca
appKey=9b4efda00920613be3ad93c9637069e9

4. Now you can run ‘mvn install’ for your project.  It will build, package and upload the workflow block into e-Science Central.  The name of the block will be the artifactId for your project.  All project settings are as decsribed in the manual.
Whilst this has described the process for Java Blocks, R and Octave are very similar.  Just replace the archetypeArtifactId with workflow-block-r or workflow-block-octave in the archetype:generate command.
If you have any problems, please leave a comment or get in touch

 

Developing Workflow Blocks for e-Science Central

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2011 No comments

Workflow blocks in e-Science Central can currently be written in Java, R or Octave.

The manual has information on how to write blocks in the different languages.  To get started, you’ll need a copy of the SDK and an account on e-Science Central.  The SDK is not currently available for users who authenticate using OpenID but we’re working to fix that.  Coming soon we’ll be releasing a Maven plugin to allow you to develop blocks in your preferred IDE.

If you have any problems, please get in touch with Hugo or Simon

e-Science Central in Windows Azure

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2011 No comments

As part of the VENUS-C Project, Jacek is porting e-Science Central to run on Windows Azure. The initial version will run inside a Windows Server 2008 VM. Following on, we will be focussing on deploying the e-Science Central workflow engine directly into a Worker Role.  This will connect to the main e-Science Central installation and allow users to schedule their workflows in Azure.  We will be using this to perform large scale QSAR modelling in the VENUS-C project (as a follow on to Project Junior).  We hope to have a test implementation in a few weeks, ready to demonstrate at the VENUS-C technical meeting.