AUTONOMIC WORKFLOW ACTIVITIES 1 Running head: THE AWARD FRAMEWORK Autonomic Workflow Activities: The AWARD Framework

the following distinct contributions: i) A discussion about the autonomic characteristics of the AWARD model; ii)The support for dynamic reconfigurations illustrated with useful reconfiguration scenarios. Acknowledgements. Thanks are due to PEst-OE/EEI/UI0527/2011, CITI/FCT/UNL-2011-2012. AUTONOMIC WORKFLOW ACTIVITIES 2 Workflows have been successfully applied to express the decomposition of complex scientific applications. This has motivated many initiatives that have been developing scientific workflow tools. However the existing tools still lack adequate support to important aspects namely, decoupling the enactment engine from workflow tasks specification, decentralizing the control of workflow activities, and allowing their tasks to run autonomous in distributed infrastructures, for instance on Clouds. Furthermore many workflow tools only support the execution of Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG) without the concept of iterations, where activities are executed millions of iterations during long periods of time and supporting dynamic workflow reconfigurations after certain iteration