AWS HealthOmics introduces caching for cancelled workflow runs

AWS HealthOmics now offers the capability to cache outputs of completed tasks from cancelled workflow runs. This feature allows users to reuse these outputs, eliminating the need to recompute previously completed tasks. When caching is activated and a run is cancelled, HealthOmics automatically saves the outputs of completed tasks in the user’s S3 bucket. This enables the option to restart runs from where they left off. AWS HealthOmics is a service eligible for HIPAA compliance, designed to assist healthcare and life sciences customers in rapidly advancing scientific discoveries with fully managed bioinformatics workflows.

The caching feature for cancelled runs provides significant benefits to researchers, bioinformaticians, and workflow developers by facilitating the debugging and iterative development of workflows. It achieves this by preserving intermediate files and completed task outputs for review. This approach not only reduces the costs associated with recomputing tasks that may have taken considerable time but also speeds up subsequent runs by focusing only on the tasks that remain unfinished.

This new caching capability is now accessible for Nextflow, WDL, and CWL runs across all AWS HealthOmics regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Israel (Tel Aviv), and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Seoul). For more detailed information, users can refer to the workflow cache documentation.