Interactive workflow-based infrastructure for urgent computing

Workflow became a mainstream formalism for complex scientific problems representation and is applied to different domains. In this paper we propose and analyze the interactive workflow model as the base for urgent computing (UC) infrastructures. Majority of research works in the area of urgent computing is focused on the deadline-driven scheduling issues for the existing high performance computing. This work tries to look at the problem of building a workflow-driven UC infrastructure from another side and to take into account the interactive nature of decision support. Workflow formalism is taken as the base for investigation. After analyzing the peculiarities of workflow-based UC infrastructure we propose an extended interactive workflow model. This model unifies the interactive capabilities of workflows and allows interactive systems to be described by consolidation of heterogeneous resources: high performance computing, users, software, external devices and data sources. This approach is represented on the crowd management application and is partially shown in the implemented prototype. (c) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer review under responsibility of the organizers of the 2013 International Conference on Computational Science