[RCAC Workshop] Genomics Exchange, Session 3: Nextflow fundamentals
📅 Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2026
⏰ Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (EDT)
💻 Location: Online (Microsoft Teams link provided upon registration)
🏫 Instructor: Yucheng Zhang, Tufts University
Please register using the link below to receive email reminders and the Microsoft Teams link; the “I’m interested” button does not provide access.
Who Should Attend
Researchers who run multi-step analyses by hand or with shell scripts and want a workflow manager to handle scheduling, retries, and provenance for them.
What You’ll Learn
Multi-step analyses have a way of growing into long, fragile shell scripts with no parallelism, no way to restart after a failure, and no record of what actually ran. Nextflow solves this by describing your steps and their dependencies, then working out what can run in parallel, where it should run, and how to pick up after a crash. The session covers the following:
- Why workflow managers exist, and what a dependency graph buys you over a bash script
- The three major components of Nextflow, namely processes, channels, and workflows
- Running Nextflow on RCAC clusters
- Executors and profiles, including the institutional profiles RCAC maintains
- Restarting a failed pipeline without recomputing finished work
By the End of the Session, You’ll
- Be able to run a Nextflow pipeline on RCAC clusters using either a local profile or a cluster-specific institutional profile
- Be able to read a Nextflow script and identify its inputs, tasks, and outputs
- Know how to restart a crashed run from where it stopped, rather than from the beginning
- Know the best practices for running Nextflow pipelines on RCAC clusters, and the common mistakes they prevent
Level
Intermediate. Comfort with the command line is expected; no prior Nextflow experience required.
Register now: Click here to register