Release notes - March 14, 2022

Support for Nextflow and WDL workflows available on BioData Catalyst powered by Seven Bridges

Apart from significant contributions from Seven Bridges team members to the development of the Common Workflow Language (CWL) and its extensive implementation on BioData Catalyst powered by Seven Bridges, we are now taking a step further and providing support for two more workflow description languages, Nextflow and WDL. This presents a groundbreaking move in the direction of enabling you to reduce the time needed to bring your apps to the Platform, eliminate the need for conversion of your Nextflow or WDL code, while still allowing you to use a better interface for running workflows and all other out-of-the-box features in the Seven Bridges ecosystem.

The process of bringing Nextflow and WDL apps to BioData Catalyst powered by Seven Bridges is designed to be in line with the existing app development tools and practices and is a matter of using the existing Nextflow and WDL code, making configuration optimizations to get the maximum out of the Seven Bridges execution environment and using the sbpack utility to help with the optimization and the actual communication with the Platform. To guide you through the process, the documentation describes the process for both Nextflow and WDL workflows.

This implementation is the initial release and will be under intensive development in the future. Further improvements will include performance improvements, such as the capability of running different parts of a Nextflow or WDL workflow on different compute instances, as well as many others that will significantly contribute to a better user experience.