Benesh: a Programming Model for Coupled Scientific Workflows

As scientific applications strive towards increasingly realistic modeling of complex phenomena, they are integrating multiple models and simulations into complex, coupled scientific workflows. As a result, ensuring that existing codes can be combined and recombined correctly and flexibly as part of these workflows is essential. In this paper, we propose Benesh, a programming system for creating in-situ scientific workflows. Benesh provides a domain-specific abstraction that enables a programmer to instrument an existing simulation code to be used as a building block in defining complex workflows. Using Benesh, developers define a workflow-level shared specification of data objects over common or partitioned data domains. This permits dependency-based execution to be specified at the workflow level, distinct from the independent operation of the component simulations. We additionally describe features of a scalable runtime that builds on a distributed data services layer to implement the Benesh programming system.