Workflow Hashing for Redundant Step Elimination
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Solution Overview
Problem
In bioinformatics workflow environments, failures and redundancies lead to inefficiencies and increased costs due to the need for manual reconfiguration and redundant processing, especially in complex computational tasks involving multiple steps and large datasets.
Innovation Solution
A system that generates and uses hash values to automatically reconstruct the computational state of workflows, allowing for efficient execution and avoidance of redundant processing by implicitly identifying the history of processing steps through hash values, thereby reducing the need for extensive user planning and reconfiguration.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If workflows are executed independently without sharing intermediate results, then each workflow can be executed autonomously, but processing redundancies occur and computational resources are wasted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple independent workflows by sharing common intermediate processing steps. When multiple workflows require the same intermediate result, the system executes the processing step once and caches the result, then reuses it across multiple workflows. This merging eliminates redundant computational operations and reduces resource consumption while maintaining workflow autonomy.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary execution of common processing steps and caches their results before they are needed by multiple workflows. By anticipating that intermediate results will be reused, the system pre-computes and stores these results, making them immediately available when subsequent workflows require them, thereby avoiding repeated execution.
2Loss of energy
If workflows are redesigned to share intermediate steps, then processing redundancies are reduced, but user planning time and workflow complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The workflow system automatically identifies common intermediate steps across multiple workflows and manages their sharing without requiring user intervention. The system self-services by autonomously analyzing workflow dependencies, caching intermediate results, and managing the complexity of shared steps, thereby eliminating the need for users to manually plan and configure workflow sharing.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary caching layer that manages intermediate processing results. This intermediary component handles the complexity of tracking, storing, and retrieving shared intermediate steps, shielding users from the underlying complexity while enabling efficient resource sharing across workflows.
3Ease of operation
If hash values are used to identify workflow states, then computational state can be automatically reconstructed without manual reconfiguration, but additional processing overhead is introduced
Solution Approach 1:
The system transforms the workflow state into a compact hash value representation. By changing the parameter from full workflow state to a condensed hash, the system enables efficient comparison and identification of computational states. This parameter transformation allows automatic reconstruction and deduplication while the hash computation overhead is minimized through efficient algorithms.
Data Source
AI summary
Various approaches for data storage and retrieval for a computer memory include processing a computational workflow having multiple data-processing steps, generating and storing a first hash value associated with a first step of the data-processing steps based on an input to the first step, generating and storing a second hash value associated with a second step of the data-processing steps based on the generated first hash value, and reconstructing a computational state of the workflow based on the second hash value, and thereby avoid re-execution of a portion of the workflow corresponding to the second hash value.