WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 241

Fig. 17.6 The graph of a workflow for the execution of the WRF-ARW weather forecast model,
downloaded from the SHIWA repository

execution of the WRF meteorological model with the workflow presented in
Fig. 17.6 that has been downloaded from the SHIWA repository (Plankensteiner
2013). But this approach is not completely satisfactory considering the project goals
for two reasons.
The first one is that with this approach the user has to deal explicitly with
the selection of the computational resource to use, and she/he has to create and
provide all the input

files containing the parameters and, possibly, also a speci cor

“ version of the executable to run. The second reason is that this work-

flow represents only a component of the project

Gridi ed ”

s experiment suites, therefore it has
to be combined with further components. Considering experiment suites 1 and 2,
three models for the weather forecast (i.e., WRF-ARW, WRF-NMM, and Meso-
NH), and three models for the hydrological forecast (DRIFT, RIBS, and HBV)
were selected, resulting in the need for the user to explicitly manage nine different
workflows.
On the contrary the design principle adopted for the DRIHM science gateway is
to provide the scientists with a high-level interface represented by a set of portlets
that allows users to de

'

ne the experiment parameters in an integrated way. This
means, for example, the possibility to check if the domain of the basin considered
for the hydrological forecast is included in the domain selected for the weather
forecast, as shown in Fig. 17.7 and that the time interval for both the simulations is
coherent. This is in addition to the possibility to select, in an automatic way, the
computational resources for each step of the workflow, considering the require-
ments of the executables, the size and the location of the data to transfer, and