A Comparison of Using Taverna and BPEL in Building Scientific Workflows: the case of caGrid.

With the emergence of "service oriented science," the need arises to orchestrate multiple services to facilitate scientific investigation-that is, to create "science workflows." We present here our findings in providing a workflow solution for the caGrid service-based grid infrastructure. We choose BPEL and Taverna as candidates, and compare their usability in the lifecycle of a scientific workflow, including workflow composition, execution, and result analysis. Our experience shows that BPEL as an imperative language offers a comprehensive set of modeling primitives for workflows of all flavors; while Taverna offers a dataflow model and a more compact set of primitives that facilitates dataflow modeling and pipelined execution. We hope that this comparison study not only helps researchers select a language or tool that meets their specific needs, but also offers some insight on how a workflow language and tool can fulfill the requirement of the scientific community.