Facilitating the Reproducibility of Scientific Workflows with Execution Environment Specifications

To evaluate our framework, we use it to run two bioinformatics scientific workflows, BLAST and BWA. The execution environment of the tasks in each workflow is specified as an Umbrella specification file, and sent to execution nodes where Umbrella is used to create the specified environment for running the tasks. For each workflow we evaluate the size of the Umbrella specification file, the time and space overheads of creating execution environments using Umbrella, and the heterogeneity of execution nodes contributing to each workflow. The evaluation results show that our framework improves the utilization of heterogeneous computing resources, and improves the portability and reproducibility of scientific workflows.