The 15th Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS) Workshop will be held in conjunction with SC20 on November 11, 2020 (virtual event).


Important Dates


Workshop Description

Scientific workflows have been almost universally used across scientific domains and have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the past several decades. Workflow management systems (WMSs) provide abstraction and automation which enable a broad range of researchers to easily define sophisticated computational processes and to then execute them efficiently on parallel and distributed computing systems. As workflows have been adopted by a number of scientific communities, they are becoming more complex and require more sophisticated workflow management capabilities. A workflow now can analyze terabyte-scale data sets, be composed of one million individual tasks, require coordination between heterogeneous tasks, manage tasks that execute for milliseconds to hours, and can process data streams, files, and data placed in object stores. The computations can be single core workloads, loosely coupled computations, or tightly all within a single workflow, and can run in dispersed computing platforms.

This workshop focuses on the many facets of scientific workflow management systems, ranging from actual execution to service management and the coordination and optimization of data, service, and job dependencies. The workshop covers a broad range of issues in the scientific workflow lifecycle that include: scientific workflows representation and enactment; workflow scheduling techniques to optimize the execution of the workflow on heterogeneous infrastructures; workflow enactment engines that need to deal with failures in the application and execution environment; and a number of computer science problems related to scientific workflows such as semantic technologies, compiler methods, scheduling and fault detection and tolerance.