Globus Automation Services: Research process automation across the space-time continuum
Ryan Chard, Jim Pruyne, Kurt McKee, Josh Bryan, Brigitte, Raumann, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster

TL;DR
This paper introduces new Globus automation services that enable reliable, scalable, and secure automation of complex research workflows across diverse, distributed scientific resources and environments.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel cloud-based platform with flexible, event-driven automation capabilities for research processes involving heterogeneous and long-lived resources.
Findings
Supports long-lived, reliable execution despite failures
Provides a flexible API for diverse actions and flows
Enables secure, event-driven automation across distributed resources
Abstract
Research process automation -- the reliable, efficient, and reproducible execution of linked sets of actions on scientific instruments, computers, data stores, and other resources -- has emerged as an essential element of modern science. We report here on new services within the Globus research data management platform that enable the specification of diverse research processes as reusable sets of actions, \emph{flows}, and the execution of such flows in heterogeneous research environments. To support flows with broad spatial extent (e.g., from scientific instrument to remote data center) and temporal extent (from seconds to weeks), these Globus automation services feature: 1) cloud hosting for reliable execution of even long-lived flows despite sporadic failures; 2) a simple specification and extensible asynchronous action provider API, for defining and executing a wide variety of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Data Quality and Management · Research Data Management Practices
