Anirban Mandal

Real-time network monitoring is essential for ensuring reliable and efficient scientific data transmission and operational continuity during oceanographic research expeditions. This article describes the deployment and operational experience of a perfSONAR-based network performance monitoring system aboard the research vessel Sikuliaq from the U.S. Academic Research Fleet during a cyberinfrastructure training expedition in April 2025. We describe the system architecture, deployment strategies, and integration with contextual environmental data collected using the CORIOLIX data presence framework. We analyze the empirical results from ship-to-shore network tests to assess system performance under varying maritime conditions during the cruise. The article further discusses practical challenges encountered, system adaptations implemented, and future directions to advance resilient cyberinfrastructure support for mobile research platforms, such as research vessels.

Anomaly detection in computational workflows is critical for ensuring system reliability and security. However, traditional rule-based methods struggle to detect novel anomalies. This paper leverages large language models (LLMs) for workflow anomaly detection by exploiting their ability to learn complex data patterns. Two approaches are investigated: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT), where pre-trained LLMs are fine-tuned on labeled data for sentence classification to identify anomalies, and 2) in-context learning (ICL) where prompts containing task descriptions and examples guide LLMs in few-shot anomaly detection without fine-tuning. The paper evaluates the performance, efficiency, generalization of SFT models, and explores zero-shot and few-shot ICL prompts and interpretability enhancement via chain-of-thought prompting. Experiments across multiple workflow datasets demonstrate the promising potential of LLMs for effective anomaly detection in complex executions.

A computational workflow, also known as workflow, consists of tasks that are executed in a certain order to attain a specific computational campaign. Computational workflows are commonly employed in science domains, such as physics, chemistry, genomics, to complete large-scale experiments in distributed and heterogeneous computing environments. However, running computations at such a large scale makes the workflow applications prone to failures and performance degradation, which can slowdown, stall, and ultimately lead to workflow failure. Learning how these workflows behave under normal and anomalous conditions can help us identify the causes of degraded performance and subsequently trigger appropriate actions to resolve them. However, learning in such circumstances is a challenging task because of the large volume of high-quality historical data needed to train accurate and reliable models. Generating such datasets not only takes a lot of time and effort but it also requires a lot of resources to be devoted to data generation for training purposes. Active learning is a promising approach to this problem. It is an approach where the data is generated as required by the machine learning model and thus it can potentially reduce the training data needed to derive accurate models. In this work, we present an active learning approach that is supported by an experimental framework, Poseidon-X, that utilizes a modern workflow management system and two cloud testbeds. We evaluate our approach using three computational workflows. For one workflow we run an end-to-end live active learning experiment, for the other two we evaluate our active learning algorithms using pre-captured data traces provided by the Flow-Bench benchmark. Our findings indicate that active learning not only saves resources, but it also improves the accuracy of the detection of anomalies.

The annual Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS) is a premier venue for the scientific workflow community to present the latest advances in research and development on the many facets of scientific workflows throughout their life-cycle. The Lightning Talks at WORKS focus on describing a novel tool, scientific workflow, or concept, which are work-in-progress and address emerging technologies and frameworks to foster discussion in the community. This paper summarizes the lightning talks at the 2023 edition of WORKS, covering five topics: leveraging large language models to build and execute workflows; developing a common workflow scheduler interface; scaling uncertainty workflow applications on exascale computing systems; evaluating a transcriptomics workflow for cloud vs. HPC systems; and best practices in migrating legacy workflows to workflow management systems.

Anomaly detection is the task of identifying abnormal behavior of a system. Anomaly detection in computational workflows is of special interest because of its wide implications in various domains such as cybersecurity, finance, and social networks. However, anomaly detection in computational workflows~(often modeled as graphs) is a relatively unexplored problem and poses distinct challenges. For instance, when anomaly detection is performed on graph data, the complex interdependency of nodes and edges, the heterogeneity of node attributes, and edge types must be accounted for. Although the use of graph neural networks can help capture complex inter-dependencies, the scarcity of labeled anomalous examples from workflow executions is still a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce an autoencoder-driven self-supervised learning~(SSL) approach that learns a summary statistic from unlabeled workflow data and estimates the normal behavior of the computational workflow in the latent space. In this approach, we combine generative and contrastive learning objectives to detect outliers in the summary statistics. We demonstrate that by estimating the distribution of normal behavior in the latent space, we can outperform state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods on our benchmark datasets.

The CI Compass Fellowship Program (CICF) was developed to broaden undergraduate student participation in cyberinfrastructure (CI) research, development, and operations. CICF is a distinctive program for undergraduate students pursuing studies in computer science, information science, data science, and other related fields. During year one of the program, CICF had six students participate from two institutions. During year 2 of the program, CICF had fourteen students participate from nine institutions. This poster provides details of the CICF program development and summarizes the impact of the first two years.

Over the past few years, due to the boom of advances in image processing, edge computing, and wireless networking, unpiloted aerial vehicles, often referred to as drones, have become an important enabler to support a wide variety of scientific applications, ranging from environmental monitoring, disaster response, and wildfire monitoring to the survey of archaeological sites. In this article, we present the FlyNet platform, which extends an existing workflow management system to support and manage scientific workflows. FlyNet enables automated resource allocation, workflow instrumentation, and network service support to support researchers in their goal to analyze data for new scientific discoveries. In addition, FlyNet provides network services management to support quality of service for efficient data transport between edge devices, edge servers, and the cloud.