One giant leap for Taverna

By Franck Tanoh, OMII-UK.

Back to index page

Previous article: Software sustainability – together we’re stronger

Next article: Crystal Structure Prediction and Condor – a match made in OMII-UK

OSSE allows JPL scientists to model how mission design objectives impact science. One of the challenges faced by the research team is the integration of various models that are used to explore the science behind the JPL’s missions. These models have been developed independently and run on different platforms, so their integration is not straightforward. The JPL’s solution is to wrap each model as a Web Service and drive them with a Web Services-enabled workflow.

JPL considered a number of different research and commercial workflow systems and finally settled on Taverna. ‘The thing that really sold us on Taverna was the dynamic WSDL introspection and presentation of the WSDL interface as ports of a process component’ said Hook Hua, a member of the High Capability Computing and Modeling Group at JPL. Taverna’s recent overhaul appears to have helped their decision too, as Hook Hua describes ‘one of the initial reasons we chose to use Taverna was its polished look and feel when compared to other workflow engines’.

In the future, JPL may upgrade their OSSE infrastructure to use Taverna 2.0, the latest version of Taverna, which has been re-written from the ground up. As far as the JPL team is concerned, Taverna has landed.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov