Building Scientific Workflows on the Grid: A Comparison between OpenMole and Taverna

Abstract

Scientific workflows are used in a number of different scientific domains. The interest for using workflows grows because of the progress of Grid computational techniques and the increased resources availability. Moreover, there are a number of scientific workflow systems that allow building workflows needed for different scientific applications and scientific experiments. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of two open source scientific workflow systems: OpenMole and Taverna. Both systems are designed to provide environments for parallel execution of processes, to support graphical workflow design, to offer scalability and remote execution of workflows (grids, clusters, clouds). The former is relatively new, but both are open to users if they want to contribute to their development. Although these two systems have a number of common features, they differ in the way of workflow composition, execution and implementation logic. In order to show and verify the similarities and differences between these two scientific workflow systems, we designed a workflow and we implemented it in both systems.