Approaches to Distributed Execution of Scientific Workflows in Kepler

The Kepler scientific workflow system enables creation, execution and sharing of workflows across a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines while also facilitating remote and distributed execution of workflows. In this paper, we present and compare different approaches to distributed execution of workflows using the Kepler environment, including a distributed data-parallel framework using Hadoop and Stratosphere, and Cloud and Grid execution using Serpens, Nimrod/K and Globus actors. We also present real-life applications in computational chemistry, bioinformatics and computational physics to demonstrate the usage of different distributed computing capabilities of Kepler in executable workflows. We further analyze the differences of each approach and provide a guidance for their applications.