Unit 12: Workflow Managers

Workflow managers are tools that help you define, execute, and monitor complex, multi-step computational workflows in a structured and reproducible way. As analyses grow to involve many interdependent steps, large datasets, and heterogenous computing environments, workflow managers provide a systematic way to encode dependencies, handle failures, and scale execution beyond what manual execution or ad hoc scripting can reliably support.

This unit introduces workflow managers at a high level, then dives into two popular tools for bioinformatics: Snakemake and Nextflow.

• Introduction to Workflow Managers
• Snakemake
• Nextflow