About

Floability is a system that enables rapid and portable deployment of notebooks expressing complex scientific workflows across a wide range of cyberinfrastructure. The key challenge is that workflows are often incomplete: code alone cannot move between facilities without accurately capturing software dependencies, required datasets, and cluster capabilities.

Floability also addresses translation between notebooks and workflows. The project is collaboratively developed by the University of Notre Dame, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of Illinois.

Docs

• Quick start instructions
• Backpack specifications
• Backpack examples

Code

The primary repository for Floability is available on GitHub.

Papers

• Islam, M. S., Azaz, T., Ahmad, R., Hossain, A. S. M. S., Baig, F., Wang, S., Lannon, K., Malik, T., and Thain, D., "Backpacks for Notebooks: Enabling Containerized Notebook Workflows in Distributed Environments", 21st IEEE International Conference on eScience, to appear, 2025.

Team

Tanu Malik

Raza Ahmad

A S M Shahadat Hossain

Talha Azaz

Collaborators

• Dr. Douglas Thain University of Notre Dame
• Dr. Kevin Lannon University of Notre Dame
• Dr. Shaowen Wang University of Illinois
• Dr. Ben Tovar University of Notre Dame
• Dr. Furqan Baig University of Illinois
• Md Saiful Islam University of Notre Dame