Building Scientific Workflows for Earth System Modelling with Windows Workflow Foundation

The GENIE project has built a Grid enabled framework that facilitates the integration, execution and management of component models for the study of the Earth system over millennial timescales. The existing framework supports collaborative study of GENIE models across heterogeneous compute grids through scripted workflows in the Matlab environment. In this paper, Windows Workflow Foundation technologies are applied to demonstrate the benefits of an environment that provides rapid composition, event driven logic and reliable hosting of scientific workflows. These improvements are demonstrated through a parametric study of bi-stability of the oceanic thermohaline circulation in a GENIE model.