Manage Reproducibility of Computational Workflows with Docker Containers and Nextflow

“Research computational workflows consist of several pieces of third party software and, because of their experimental nature, frequent changes and updates are commonly necessary thus raising serious deployment and reproducibility issues. Docker containers are emerging as a possible solution for many of these problems, as they allow the packaging of pipelines in an isolated and self-contained manner. This presentation will introduce our experience deploying genomic pipelines with Docker containers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). I will discuss how we implemented it, the main issues we faced, the pros and cons of using Docker in an HPC environment including a benchmark of the impact of containers technology on the performance of the executed applications.”