An Architectural Evaluation for Scientific Workflow Service Deployment in a Virtual Laboratory

Workflow is one of vital facilities in virtual laboratory for complex scientific computation. However, where to deploy a workflow service in a virtual laboratory is a challenging software architectural decision to make with tradeoff of requirements and resources. This paper presents an architectural evaluation for deploying a scientific workflow service in a collaborative environment. We evaluate three deployment options by comparing them against common scientific virtual laboratory requirements. While this case study is for a particular collaboration platform and application domain, the evaluation method, process and conclusion can be useful and reused in other service deployment decision making.