Affiliations: Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing,
School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK E-mail:
{povs,ktakeda,sjc}@soton.ac.uk | School of Electronics and Computer Science, University
of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK. E-mail: dan@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Note: [] Corresponding author
Abstract: Enabling the full life cycle of scientific and engineering workflows
requires robust middleware and services that support effective data management,
near-realtime data movement and custom data processing. Many existing solutions
exploit the database as a passive metadata catalog. In this paper, we present
an approach that makes use of federation of databases to host data-centric wind
tunnel application workflows. The user is able to compose customized
application workflows based on database services. We provide a reference
implementation that leverages typical business tools and technologies:
Microsoft SQL Server for database services and Windows Workflow Foundation for
workflow services. The application data and user's code are both hosted in
federated databases. With the growing interest in XML Web Services in
scientific Grids, and with databases beginning to support native XML types and
XML Web services, we can expect the role of databases in scientific computation
to grow in importance.
