How Modern Workflow Systems Enhance Research Throughput and Reliability

In computational research, the gap between a working prototype and a production-ready analysis often becomes a major bottleneck for scientific discovery. Principal Investigators and research groups frequently struggle with fragile scripts, manual data handling, and inefficient resource usage that slow down time-to-result and complicate reproducibility. This seminar explores how Research Software Engineering (RSE) practices—specifically using Workflow Management Systems like Nextflow—can directly address these challenges to benefit your research.

Using a real-world, computationally intensive case study, we will demonstrate how modern workflows transform complex analyses into robust, automated pipelines. Rather than focusing on code, we will discuss the tangible benefits for research groups, including:

• Scalability: Effortlessly moving analysis from a single laptop to massive HPC clusters without rewriting software.
• Resource Efficiency: Optimizing grant resources by maximizing computational throughput and minimizing wasted compute time.
• Portability: Enabling seamless collaboration by making pipelines easy to share and run across different institutions or cloud environments.
• Reproducibility: Ensuring that results generated today can be exactly replicated months or years later by any lab member.

Join us on Wednesday, Mar. 4 at 1pm MST on Zoom!