Kepler Core

Project Goals

The Kepler/CORE Project is an NSF-funded effort to coordinate development of Kepler and to enhance the attributes and functions of the system most important for broad adoption and long-term sustainability (see Kepler/CORE Vision & Mission). The primary goal is to serve the broadest set of science communities possible by making the system more comprehensive, open, reliable and extensible.

Independently extensible. Widespread, multidisciplinary adoption of Kepler requires that members of specific communities contribute specialized actors and system extensions suitable to their own communities. Kepler thus must be independently extensible by groups not directly collaborating with the team that develops and maintains the core of the Kepler system.

Open. Facilitating extension in turn requires that the Kepler architecture be open and that the mechanisms and interfaces provided for developing extensions be well designed and clearly articulated.

Reliable. For Kepler to be seen as a viable starting point for developing workflow-oriented applications, and as middleware for developing user-oriented scientific applications, Kepler must be reliable both as a development platform and as a run-time environment for the user.

Comprehensive. To fulfill the greater promise of accelerating scientific discovery, Kepler must represent a comprehensive system with first-class support for managing data passing through and between workflow runs, decoupling workflow definitions from the specific technologies used to provide run-time services, and for providing a rich environment to manage data, workflows, and results in the context of specific projects.

 

Science communities

Unlike other scientific research projects contributing to Kepler development, Kepler/CORE has no research and engineering goals outside of the improvement of the Kepler system itself. Kepler/CORE uses a stakeholder advisory process that helps define the scientific use cases and user communities for which Kepler/CORE is targeting its solutions. Kepler/CORE team members will meet periodically with a council of current Kepler stakeholders, representing communities already committed to applying Kepler to specific research domains, as well as with potential future users in additional scientific domains, to gather requirements and ascertain relative priorities of needed features. The Kepler stakeholders council also will evaluate potential business models for sustaining development and maintenance of the Kepler system beyond the funding period of this proposal. Finally, the Kepler/CORE team will reach out to the broader scientific community by training future workflow end-users, workflow engineers, and Kepler extension developers, as well as by disseminating documentation and training materials.

 

Kepler/CORE Team Members

Kepler/CORE is a collaborative effort lead by a team spanning several of the key institutions that originated the Kepler project: UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego.

 

	Bertram Ludaescher Shawn Bowers Timothy McPhillips
	Matthew Jones Mark Schildhauer
	Ilkay Altintas

 

More information

Detailed background information and plans may be found in the Kepler/CORE proposal. For additional information or to join in this effort, please contact us at kepler-core at kepler-project dot org. The Kepler/CORE team welcomes comments on our plans and the full participation of the Kepler community in this effort.