Poster: Using Business Workflows to Improve Quality of Experiments in Distributed Systems Research

Distributed systems pose many difficult problems to researchers. Due to their large-scale complexity, their numerous constituents (e.g., computing nodes, network links) tend to fail in unpredictable ways. This particular fragility of experiment execution threatens reproducibility, often considered to be a foundation of experimental science. Our poster presents a new approach to description and execution of experiments involving large-scale computer installations. The main idea consists in describing the experiment as workflow and using achievements of Business Workflow Management to reliably and efficiently execute it. Moreover, to facilitate the design process, the framework provides abstractions that hide unnecessary complexity from the user.