Workflows Community Summit 2024: Future Trends and Challenges in Scientific Workflows

TL;DR

The summit discussed emerging trends and challenges in scientific workflows, emphasizing AI-HPC integration, multi-facility data management, user experience, and FAIR principles to advance scientific discovery.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of future trends, challenges, and strategic recommendations for evolving scientific workflows in AI, HPC, and multi-facility research environments.

Findings

AI and exascale computing enhance models but increase complexity.

Multi-facility workflows face data movement and silo challenges.

Standardized metrics and frameworks are needed for progress.

Abstract

The Workflows Community Summit gathered 111 participants from 18 countries to discuss emerging trends and challenges in scientific workflows, focusing on six key areas: time-sensitive workflows, AI-HPC convergence, multi-facility workflows, heterogeneous HPC environments, user experience, and FAIR computational workflows. The integration of AI and exascale computing has revolutionized scientific workflows, enabling higher-fidelity models and complex, time-sensitive processes, while introducing challenges in managing heterogeneous environments and multi-facility data dependencies. The rise of large language models is driving computational demands to zettaflop scales, necessitating modular, adaptable systems and cloud-service models to optimize resource utilization and ensure reproducibility. Multi-facility workflows present challenges in data movement, curation, and overcoming institutional silos, while diverse hardware architectures require integrating workflow considerations into early system design and developing standardized resource management tools. The summit emphasized improving user experience in workflow systems and ensuring FAIR workflows to enhance collaboration and accelerate scientific discovery. Key recommendations include developing standardized metrics for time-sensitive workflows, creating frameworks for cloud-HPC integration, implementing distributed-by-design workflow modeling, establishing multi-facility authentication protocols, and accelerating AI integration in HPC workflow management. The summit also called for comprehensive workflow benchmarks, workflow-specific UX principles, and a FAIR workflow maturity model, highlighting the need for continued collaboration in addressing the complex challenges posed by the convergence of AI, HPC, and multi-facility research environments.