DCMay 22
An Ecosystem of Services for FAIR Computational WorkflowsSean R. Wilkinson, Johan Gustafsson, Finn Bacall et al.
Computational workflows represent major investments of effort and expertise. As first-class, publishable research objects of their own, they are key to sharing methodological know-how for reuse, reproducibility, and transparency. Thus, the application of the FAIR Principles to workflows is inevitable to enable them to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Making workflows FAIR reduces duplication of effort, assists in the reuse of best practice approaches and community-supported standards, and ensures that workflows as digital objects can support reproducible, robust science. FAIR workflows draw from both FAIR data and software principles, and they help ensure and support data FAIRification. The FAIR Principles emphasize the association of persistent identifiers and machine-actionable metadata with workflows. Implementing the Principles requires a framework with appropriate programmatic protocols and an accompanying ecosystem of services, tools, policies, and best practices, as well the buy-in of existing workflow systems. The European EOSC-Life Workflow Collaboratory is an example of such a digital infrastructure for the Biosciences. It includes a metadata standards framework for describing workflows that is managed and used by dedicated new FAIR workflow services and programmatic APIs for interoperability and metadata access. It includes the WorkflowHub registry and LifeMonitor workflow testing service, and it incorporates existing workflow systems and packaging solutions. Here, we introduce the FAIR Principles for workflows and connect FAIR workflows with the FAIR ecosystems they inhabit with the EOSC-Life Collaboratory as a concrete example. We also introduce other community efforts that are easing the ways that workflows are shared and reused by others, and we discuss how the variations in different workflow settings impact their FAIR perspectives.
CLAug 11, 2022
Figure Descriptive Text Extraction using Ontological RepresentationGilchan Park, Julia Rayz, Line Pouchard
Experimental research publications provide figure form resources including graphs, charts, and any type of images to effectively support and convey methods and results. To describe figures, authors add captions, which are often incomplete, and more descriptions reside in body text. This work presents a method to extract figure descriptive text from the body of scientific articles. We adopted ontological semantics to aid concept recognition of figure-related information, which generates human- and machine-readable knowledge representations from sentences. Our results show that conceptual models bring an improvement in figure descriptive sentence classification over word-based approaches.
LGJan 13, 2023
A Rigorous Uncertainty-Aware Quantification Framework Is Essential for Reproducible and Replicable Machine Learning WorkflowsLine Pouchard, Kristofer G. Reyes, Francis J. Alexander et al.
The ability to replicate predictions by machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) models and results in scientific workflows that incorporate such ML/AI predictions is driven by numerous factors. An uncertainty-aware metric that can quantitatively assess the reproducibility of quantities of interest (QoI) would contribute to the trustworthiness of results obtained from scientific workflows involving ML/AI models. In this article, we discuss how uncertainty quantification (UQ) in a Bayesian paradigm can provide a general and rigorous framework for quantifying reproducibility for complex scientific workflows. Such as framework has the potential to fill a critical gap that currently exists in ML/AI for scientific workflows, as it will enable researchers to determine the impact of ML/AI model prediction variability on the predictive outcomes of ML/AI-powered workflows. We expect that the envisioned framework will contribute to the design of more reproducible and trustworthy workflows for diverse scientific applications, and ultimately, accelerate scientific discoveries.
DCJul 15, 2025
PGT-I: Scaling Spatiotemporal GNNs with Memory-Efficient Distributed TrainingSeth Ockerman, Amal Gueroudji, Tanwi Mallick et al.
Spatiotemporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) are powerful tools for modeling spatial and temporal data dependencies. However, their applications have been limited primarily to small-scale datasets because of memory constraints. While distributed training offers a solution, current frameworks lack support for spatiotemporal models and overlook the properties of spatiotemporal data. Informed by a scaling study on a large-scale workload, we present PyTorch Geometric Temporal Index (PGT-I), an extension to PyTorch Geometric Temporal that integrates distributed data parallel training and two novel strategies: index-batching and distributed-index-batching. Our index techniques exploit spatiotemporal structure to construct snapshots dynamically at runtime, significantly reducing memory overhead, while distributed-index-batching extends this approach by enabling scalable processing across multiple GPUs. Our techniques enable the first-ever training of an ST-GNN on the entire PeMS dataset without graph partitioning, reducing peak memory usage by up to 89% and achieving up to a 11.78x speedup over standard DDP with 128 GPUs.
DCOct 21, 2025
A Distributed Framework for Causal Modeling of Performance Variability in GPU TracesAnkur Lahiry, Ayush Pokharel, Banooqa Banday et al.
Large-scale GPU traces play a critical role in identifying performance bottlenecks within heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. However, the sheer volume and complexity of a single trace of data make performance analysis both computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we present an end-to-end parallel performance analysis framework designed to handle multiple large-scale GPU traces efficiently. Our proposed framework partitions and processes trace data concurrently and employs causal graph methods and parallel coordinating chart to expose performance variability and dependencies across execution flows. Experimental results demonstrate a 67% improvement in terms of scalability, highlighting the effectiveness of our pipeline for analyzing multiple traces independently.