Eclipse Triquetrum delivers an open platform for managing and executing scientific workflows. The goal of Triquetrum is to support a wide range of use cases, ranging from automated processes based on predefined models, to replaying ad-hoc research workflows recorded from a user's actions in a scientific workbench UI. It will allow to define and execute models from personal pipelines with a few steps to massive models with thousands of elements.
Besides delivering a generic workflow environment, Triquetrum also deliverd extensions with a focus on scientific software. There is no a-priori limitation on target scientific domains, but the current interested organizations are big research institutions in materials research (synchrotrons), physics and engineering.
The integration of a workflow system in a platform for scientific software can bring many benefits :
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the steps in scientific processes are made explicitly visible in the workflow models (i.o. being hidden inside program code).
Such models can serve as a means to present, discuss and share scientific processes in communities with different skills-sets - allow differentiating for different roles within a common tools set : software engineers, internal scientists, visiting scientists etc
- promotes reuse of software assets and modular solution design
- technical services for automating complex processes in a scalable and maintainable way
- crucial tool for advanced analytics on gigantic datasets
- integrates execution tracing, provenance data, etc.
The implementation will be based on the Ptolemy II framework from UC Berkeley.