From the Desktop to the Grid: conversion of KNIME Workflows to gUSE

Abstract

The Konstanz Information Miner is a user-friendly graphical workflow designer with a broad user base in industry and academia. Its broad range of embedded tools and its powerful data mining and visualization tools render it ideal for scientific workflows. It is thus used more and more in a broad range of applications. However, the free version typically runs on a desktop computer, restricting users if they want to tap into computing power. The grid and cloud User Support Environment is a free and open source project created for parallelized and distributed systems, but the creation of workflows with the included components has a steeper learning curve. In this work we suggest an easy to implement solution combining the ease-of-use of the Konstanz Information Miner with the computational power of distributed computing infrastructures. We present a solution permitting the conversion of workflows between the two platforms. This enables a convenient development, debugging, and maintenance of scientific workflows on the desktop. These workflows can then be deployed on a cloud or grid, thus permitting large-scale computation. To achieve our goals, we relied on a Common Tool Description XML file format which describes the execution of arbitrary programs in a structured and easily readable and parseable way. In order to integrate external programs into we employed the Generic KNIME Nodes extension.