TaskVine: Managing In-Cluster Storage for High-Throughput Data Intensive Workflows.

Many scientific applications are expressed as high-throughput workflows that consist of large graphs of data assets and tasks to be executed on large parallel and distributed systems. A challenge in executing these workflows is managing data: both datasets and software must be efficiently distributed to cluster nodes; intermediate data must be conveyed between tasks; output data must be delivered to its destination. Scaling problems result when these actions are performed in an uncoordinated manner on a shared filesystem. To address this problem, we introduce TaskVine: a system for exploiting the aggregate local storage and network capacity of a large cluster. TaskVine tracks the lifetime of data in a workflow –from archival sources to final outputs– making use of local storage to distribute, and re-use data wherever possible. We describe the architecture and novel capabilities of TaskVine, and demonstrate its use with applications in genomics, high energy physics, molecular dynamics, and machine learning.