Automating environmental computing applications with scientific workflows

Computational environmental science applications have evolved and become more complex over the last decade. In order to cope with the needs of such applications, computational methods and technologies have emerged to support the execution of these applications on heterogeneous, distributed systems. Among them are workflow management systems such as Pegasus. Pegasus is being used by researchers to model seismic wave propagation, to discover new celestial objects, to study RNA critical to human brain development, and to investigate other important research questions. This paper provides an introduction to scientific workflows and describes Pegasus and its main features. The paper highlights how the environmental science community has used Pegasus to automate their scientific workflow executions on high performance and high throughput computing systems by presenting three use cases: two Earth science workflows, and a climate science workflow.