The Australian BioCommons Nextflow Tower pilot project

Pilot project outline

Through a licence agreement with Seqera Labs, Australian BioCommons is in the process of standing up a national Nextflow Tower service, enabling a centralised command post for Nextflow workflows to be offered as a fully subsidised service for Australian researchers.

Working with partners including service hosts Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, NCI Australia, Sydney Informatics Hub, QCIF and Melbourne Bioinformatics, the Australian Nextflow Tower Service will deliver a key component of the BioCommons’ vision for an ecosystem of data analysis and digital asset stewardship platforms. The Tower pilot project is delivered through the BioCommons Bring Your Own Data’ Expansion Project, which attracts ARDC and Bioplatforms Australia funding.

Aims of the pilot project

The pilot project has four key ambitions, which are to:

Establish a service where BioCommons early adopters, including researchers and workflow developers, can easily run, manage and monitor the execution of Nextflow workflows on dedicated compute infrastructure
Understand service demand and utilisation by working with users and assessing interest from potential users
Develop a business case for conversion of the pilot project to a national service
Develop service operational models

At the end of the pilot phase, the Australian BioCommons will make a decision on providing this service long term. Successful use cases will play a major role in influencing this decision.

Pilot project status

Since investigations commenced in July 2022:

Nextflow Tower has been deployed on Pawsey infrastructure
40 Researchers from 20 groups/organisations such as AGRF, AusARG, WEHI, Telethon Kids Institute, Children’s Cancer Institute, the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research, QUT and the University of Sydney are developing and running Nextflow workflows through the service
Several workflows have been run on Pawsey, NCI, AGRF and AWS infrastructure.