The Australian Nextflow Seqera Service: Your one-stop shop for Nextflow workflows

A new service provides access to a centralised command post for Australian researchers to manage, launch and monitor their Nextflow workflows. This subsidised access to Seqera Platform is now available through a licensing agreement between Seqera and Australian BioCommons.

Researchers can run workflows on the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service using their existing allocations at their preferred compute infrastructure, including local high-performance computers (HPCs) or commercial cloud services. Alternatively, national compute resources at Tier 1 facilities are available through the complementary Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS). Dr Magdalena Antczak, Bioinformatician at QCIF, found this connection particularly helpful:

Thanks to the resources allocated to us by the ABLeS program, we were able to launch the ONTViSc pipeline detecting viruses from plants from within the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service. We could test the pipeline thoroughly using multiple high-performance computing infrastructures and cater for users without easy access to bioinformatics services.

Out-of-the-box configurations for running Nextflow pipelines on Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre’s Setonix and National Computational Infrastructure’s (NCI’s) Gadi are available. Or if research groups need a more bespoke approach, extensive technical documentation and the friendly user guide will help tailor the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service to their needs.

Dr Julie Iskander, Lead Research Computing Engineer at WEHI, has seen the benefits for researchers first hand:

WEHI’s Research Computing Platform Engineering team supports WEHI researchers through software engineering services to build tools and pipelines. Seqera Platform has helped us a lot. We've been able to invite our researchers to jump in and see if the platform meets their needs. With the support of the BioCommons, we've had 15 researchers across 7 of our different research groups try it out. It's made launching pipelines easy for researchers who are not familiar with linux systems and command line. This helps them to independently run complex workflows on the HPC, with minimum knowledge of its underlying complexities.

WEHI was one of the 33 groups across 16 Australian research institutes taking part in BioCommons’ successful two-year pilot program, supported by Pawsey, NCI, Sydney Informatics Hub, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) and the University of Melbourne. Over that time, Seqera worked with BioCommons to understand how to best support the local Nextflow community and match Australian researchers’ sophisticated usage of the workflow management and data analysis environment, Seqera Platform.

The Australian Nextflow Seqera Service is fully subsidised for groups of up to three users to work collaboratively in a dedicated workspace. Larger organisations can explore the service at no cost by bringing an unlimited number of users to their dedicated workspaces for their first year of use (annual fee applies thereafter).

The Australian Nextflow Seqera Service is a key component of BioCommons’ vision to build an ecosystem of data analysis infrastructures that empower breakthrough discoveries.

Find out more about the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service and register to get started today!

The Australian Nextflow Seqera Service is operated by Australian BioCommons in collaboration with Pawsey, NCI, and Seqera. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services and supported by Bioplatforms Australia via NCRIS funding.