A Systematic Mapping Study of Italian Research on Workflows

Abstract

An entire ecosystem of methodologies and tools revolves around scientific workflow management. They cover crucial non-functional requirements that standard workflow models fail to target, such as interactive execution, energy efficiency, performance portability, Big Data management, and intelligent orchestration in the Computing Continuum. Characterizing and monitoring this ecosystem is crucial to developing an informed view of current and future research directions. This work conducts a systematic mapping study of the Italian workflow research community, analyzing 25 tools and 10 applications from several scientific domains in the context of the "National Research Centre for HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing"(ICSC). The study aims to outline the main current research directions and determine how they address the critical needs of modern scientific applications. The findings highlight a variegated research ecosystem of tools, with a prominent interest in advanced workflow orchestration and still immature but promising efforts toward energy efficiency.