Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science

International audienceWORKS'11 was the sixth issue in the WORKS workshop series. The call for papers attracted 23 submissions from Europe, North and South America. The program committee accepted 15 papers that cover a variety of topics, ranging from large-scale execution management of workflows (scalability, fault-tolerance, performance, optimization, etc) to workflows exploitation (reuse, portability, interoperability, traceability, etc). This issue was also the opportunity for an inspiring keynote that surveyed the past issues and future trends given by the former WORKS chair, Ewa Deelman. The attendance was above expectations with more than 80 participants.To foster discussions and encourage more exchanges between researchers working on closely related topics, we organized mini-panel discussions at the end of each thematic session this year. The five sessions organized confirmed the vivid interest for distributed-computing workflows animating several communities: experts of distributed computing systems as well as end users in need for high-end, accessible computing infrastructures. Traditional research topics from distributed-computing were well represented with papers on scalability, fault-tolerance, performance and optimization of workflow management systems. The now well-identified scientific data provenance theme in workflows was also well subscribed. In addition we could observe the growing interest for workflow reuse and workflow systems interoperability showing a maturity level of the scientific workflows community. With extended usage of the existing solutions, users are increasingly looking for on-line workflow resources. Beyond mere computational capability, workflows are also used for knowledge and know-how transfer, causing new needs to emerge such as community distribution of workflows, high-level representation and automated transformations