SIMPL - A Framework for Accessing External Data in Simulation Workflows

Adequate data management and data provisioning are among the most important topics to cope with the information explosion intrinsically associated with simulation applications. Today, data exchange with and between simulation applications is mainly accomplished in a file-style manner. These files show proprietary formats and have to be transformed according to the specific needs of simulation applications. Lots of effort has to be spent to find appropriate data sources and to specify and implement data transformations. In this paper, we present SIMPL – an extensible framework that provides a generic and consolidated abstraction for data management and data provisioning in simulation workflows. We introduce extensions to workflow languages and show how they are used to model the data provisioning for simulation workflows based on data management patterns. Furthermore, we show how the framework supports a uniform access to arbitrary external data in such workflows. This removes the burden from engineers and scientists to specify low-level details of data management for their simulation applications and thus boosts their productivity.