Nextflow has changed the way science does computing and energized a community. We need this.
In recent years, we’ve all been amazed at how large areas of scientific computing have moved to abstract their workflows away from the details of systems and cluster architecture. Bioinformatics has really lead the way in this regard - exploiting the fact that they came to large scale computing without decades of legacy code.
Nextflow is an open source project that has been hugely impactful in that movement, enabling a community leverage each other’s scientific work and - honestly - stand on each others’ shoulders to reach further. We didn’t need a pandemic to drive that point home, but they played their part there too (more on that in a later show).
Today we’re joined by Evan Floden, who is a principle author of Nextflow (along with other leaders like Paolo Di Tommaso who was one of Nextflow’s creators). Evan is also the CEO of Seqera Labs, the company he and Paolo formed to provide extra support to Nextflow users, and to take management of the workflows and integration with the underlying infrastructure to a whole new level.
Evan shows us some of Nextflow’s latest tricks and gives us an insight to some of the cool things coming in Nextflow Tower - the Seqera Labs product.
During the discussion he talks a lot about the community, not least of which is:
- nf-co.re - the NF Core project which is a library of shareable and editable workflows;
- nextflow.io itself
- Seqera.io (who, by the way, are hiring like crazy at the moment).
If you have ideas for technical topics you’d like to see us cover in a future show, let us know by finding us on Twitter (@TechHpc) and DM’ing us with your idea.