Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Zoom Webinar
14 December 2021
BioNix: functional, highly reproducible bioinformatics workflows
Justin BedoWEHI Bioinformatics
A challenge for computational biologists is to make our analyses reproducible - that is, easy to rerun, combine, and share, with the assurance that equivalent runs will generate identical results. Current best practice aims at this using a combination of package managers, workflow engines, and containers.
BioNix is a lightweight library built on the Nix deployment system that manages software dependencies, computational environments, and workflow stages together using a single abstraction: pure functions. BioNix lets users specify workflows in a clean, uniform way, with strong reproducibility guarantees.
In this talk I will discuss experiences gained from using the system at scale, issues encountered, and current development directions.