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Google Cloud Batch

Fusion simplifies and improves the efficiency of Nextflow pipelines in Google Cloud Batch in several ways:

  • No need to use the gcloud CLI tool for copying data to and from Google Cloud storage.
  • No need to create custom containers to include the gcloud CLI tool.
  • Fusion uses an efficient data transfer and caching algorithm that provides much faster throughput compared to gcloud CLI and does not require a local copy of data files.
  • Replacing the gcloud CLI with a native API client, the transfer is much more robust at scale.

Platform Google Cloud Batch compute environments​

Seqera Platform supports Fusion in Google Cloud Batch compute environments.

See Google Cloud Batch for compute and storage recommendations and instructions to enable Fusion.

Nextflow CLI​

When Fusion v2 is enabled, the following virtual machine settings are applied:

  • A 375 GB local NVMe SSD is selected for all compute jobs.
  • If you do not specify a machine type, a VM from the following families that support local SSDs will be selected: n1-*, n2-*, n2d-*, c2-*, c2d-*, m3-*.
  • Any machine types you specify in the Nextflow config must support local SSDs.
  • Local SSDs are only offered in multiples of 375 GB. You can increment the number of SSDs used per process with the disk directive to request multiples of 375 GB.
  • Fusion v2 can also use persistent disks for caching. Override the disk requested by Fusion using the disk directive and the type: pd-standard.
  • The machineType directive can be used to specify a VM instance type, family, or custom machine type in a comma-separated list of patterns. For example, c2-*, n1-standard-1, custom-2-4, n*, m?-standard-*.

  1. Provide your Google credentials via the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable or with the gcloud auth application-default login command. See Credentials for more information.

  2. Add the following to your nextflow.conf file:

    fusion.enabled = true
    wave.enabled = true
    process.scratch = false
    process.executor = 'google-batch'
    google.location  = '<YOUR GOOGLE LOCATION>'

    Replace <YOUR GOOGLE LOCATION> with the Google region of your choice, such as europe-west2.

  3. Run the pipeline with the usual run command:

    nextflow run <YOUR PIPELINE SCRIPT> -w gs://<YOUR-BUCKET>/work

    Replace <YOUR-BUCKET> with a Google Cloud Storage bucket to which you have read-write access.