Dynamic steering of HPC scientific workflows: A survey

• Survey on dynamic user steering and runtime changes in scientific workflow execution in HPC.
• Discussion on the requirements to support dynamic steering on scientific workflows.
• Taxonomy with the main concepts in dynamic workflows and user steering in parallel executions.
• Evaluation and comparison of different approaches in literature that, fully or partially, support dynamic steering of workflows.
• Bioinformatics workflows show a typical scenario of dynamic workflows and user steering.

The field of scientific workflow management systems has grown significantly as applications start using them successfully. In 2007, several active researchers in scientific workflow developments presented the challenges for the state of the art in workflow technologies at that time. Many issues have been addressed, but one of them named ‘dynamic workflows and user steering’ remains with many open problems despite the contributions presented in the recent years. This article surveys the early and current efforts in this topic and proposes a taxonomy to identify the main concepts related to addressing issues in dynamic steering of high performance computing (HPC) in scientific workflows. The main concepts are related to putting the human-in-the-loop of the workflow lifecycle, involving user support in real-time monitoring, notification, analysis and interference by adapting the workflow execution at runtime.