Scaling Up Comparative Genomics with Makeflow

The CoGe Comparative Genomics Portal provides on-the-fly genomic analysis and comparative tools for nearly 20,000 genomes from 15,000 organisms and has become more and more popular as genome sequence has become less expensive. The portal runs about 10,000 workflows a month and needed a robust solution for distributed computing of various workflows that range from simple to complex. Using Makeflow , the CoGe team is modularizing the workflows being run through CoGe, has early wins in delivering value to the system by easily monitoring/restarting workflows, and is now starting to work on distributing computation across multiple types of compute resources.

• Eric Lyons, University of Arizona