Enabling reproducible in silico data analyses with Nextflow - Paolo Di Tommaso

Talk from the SciLifeLab Bioinformatics and Genomics seminar series (“BiG Talks!”) - a new initiative that aims to give inspiration to the SciLifeLab community and to create new networking possibilities. Paolo Di Tommaso - Enabling reproducible in-silico data analyses with Nextflow. October 1st, SciLifeLab Stockholm. Reproducibility has become one of biology's most pressing issues. This impasse has been fuelled by the combined reliance on increasingly complex data analysis methods and the exponential growth of biological datasets. When considering the installation, deployment and maintenance of bioinformatic pipelines, an even more challenging picture emerges due to the lack of community standards. Moreover, the effect of limited standards on reproducibility is amplified by the very diverse range of computational platforms and configurations on which these applications are expected to be applied (workstations, clusters, HPC, clouds, etc.). This presentation will give an introduction of Nextflow, a pipeline orchestration tool that has been designed to address exactly these issues. Nextflow is a computational environment which provides a domain specific language (DSL), meant to simplify the writing of complex distributed computational pipelines in a portable and replicable manner. It allows the seamless parallelisation and deployment of any existing application with minimal development and maintenance overhead, irrespective of the original programming language.