2025 IEEE Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award / Research Director, Science Automation Technologies Division at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. US.

“Reimagining Workflow Management“

Monday 16 February 2026

Abstract

As scientific applications increasingly span HPC clusters, cloud resources, GPUs, and edge systems, managing workflows across these heterogeneous environments has become a critical challenge. Traditional centralized workflow scheduling approaches struggle to adapt to dynamic resource availability, varying data locality, and performance heterogeneity. To address these limitations, the talk presents SWARM, a multi-agent orchestration framework that enables decentralized, adaptive workflow scheduling for heterogeneous computing systems.

SWARM’s architecture decomposes the scheduling problem into interdependent components — job selection, job scheduling, consensus algorithms, and overlay network formation. It integrates simulation, emulation, and system prototyping to evaluate algorithmic and architectural trade-offs on real systems including the NSF FABRIC testbed and DOE computing facilities at ANL, LBNL, and ORNL. Through this layered methodology, SWARM enables systematic exploration of both mathematical formulations and intelligent coordination strategies for distributed resource management.

This talk describes SWARM advances, its design of self-managing heterogeneous systems that dynamically coordinate resources under uncertainty. This approach provides a new architectural foundation for heterogeneous computing — one that prioritizes adaptability, decentralized intelligence, and co-evolution between scheduling algorithms and system state.

Bio

Ewa Deelman received her PhD in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1998. Following a postdoc at the UCLA Computer Science Department she joined the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in 2000, where she is serving as a Research Director and is leading the Science Automation Technologies group. She is also a Research Professor at the USC Computer Science Department and an AAAS and IEEE Fellow.

The USC/ISI Science Automation Technologies group explores the interplay between automation and the management of scientific workflows that include resource provisioning and data management. She pioneered workflow planning for computations executing in distributed environments. Her group has lead the design and development of the Pegasus Workflow Management software and conducts research in job scheduling and resource provisioning in distributed systems, workflow performance modeling, provenance capture, and the use of cloud platforms for science. In 2006 she founded the Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, which is held annually in conjunction with the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC) conference.

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