Erin Griffiths
My name is Erin Griffiths and this site is a record of the time I spent researching at the University of Southern California: Information Sciences Institute while participating in the DREU program in the summer of 2010.
The project I will be working on deals with the data management of workflows. A workflow is a set of tasks that must be accomplished in order to produce the correct output. For example, the montage workflow takes a large number of telescope images and, through a number of processes, fits them together to form a large, cohesive picture of the night sky. This means, of course, that there are a lot of these telescope images, or input files, that must be transfered to the cluster of machines running the workflow, or "staged in". At the moment all of the stage-in is done inside the program that is actually running the workflow. Our goal is to move this process outside of the program running the workflow and to implement the stage-in using another program. In doing so we hope to find ways to significantly decrease the time it takes for the workflow to run. I will be working on this project with another DREU student named Samuel Hopkins.