A comparison of using Taverna and BPEL in building scientific workflows: the case of caGrid.

Journal article

When the emergence of 'service-oriented science,' the need arises to orchestrate multiple services to facilitate scientific investigation-that is, to create 'science workflows.' We present here our findings in providing a workflow solution for the caGrid service-based grid infrastructure. We choose BPEL and Taverna as candidates, and compare their usability in the lifecycle of a scientific workflow, including workflow composition, execution, and result analysis. Our experience shows that BPEL as an imperative language offers a comprehensive set of modeling primitives for workflows of all flavors; whereas Taverna offers a dataflow model and a more compact set of primitives that facilitates dataflow modeling and pipelined execution. We hope that this comparison study not only helps researchers to select a language or tool that meets their specific needs, but also offers some insight into how a workflow language and tool can fulfill the requirement of the scientific community. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.

Authors: Tan, W; Missier, P; Foster, I; Madduri, R; Roure, D

• Journal: Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 1098-1117
• Publication date: 2010-01-01
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.1547
• EISSN: 1532-0634
• ISSN: 1532-0626
• Language: English
• Keywords: Functional programming; CaGrid; Taverna; Scientific workflow; BPEL