A workflow job manager for the Nevada Climate Change Portal

Model coupling has been of interest due to its promise of assisting massive amounts of reuse and thereby speeding up development cycles. A project at the University of Nevada, Reno dubbed the Nevada Climate Change Portal is currently being developed to assist in providing climate data and data services to researchers. One part of this portal is being developed to enable users to define scientific workflows and then run them. It is in this particular functionality of the Nevada Climate Change Portal in which the topic of this paper resides. This paper is concerned with the creation of a web-service based workflow job manager to present information more graphically than the typical text-based job manager. Modern software technologies such as .Net, Silverlight, WSDL, SOAP, and Graphviz are used to develop the features of this software. Aside from the gross technical details, the proposed job manager contains a way to represent the current progression status of a simulation in a graphical form and it is hoped that this will allow the adaption of the GUI to a wider variety of platforms such as smart phones or tablet computers. Increasing the availability of the job manager to different platforms is expected to allow users to collaborate in a more convenient manner, because they no longer need to use a PC with a large display in order to view the status of their running jobs.