Re: [gwl-devel] Next steps for the GWL

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi simon,

>> * tighter integration with Guix features, e.g. to export a container
>>   image per process via “guix pack” or to pack up the whole workflow as
>>   a relocatable executable.
>
> Yes! Awesome.
> Relocatable tarballs. Docker images. Singularity one.
>
> And maybe generate one pack (docker) per process and something to glue
> together, e.g.,
> http://www.genouest.org/godocker/

Generating one “containe image” per process is a desirable goal (even
though it seems a little wasteful).  I don’t know how godocker fits into
this.  The home page says;

    It is a batch computing/cluster management tool using Docker as
    execution/isolation system. It can be seen like Sun Grid
    Engine/Torque/... The software does not manage however itself the
    dispatch of the commands on the remote nodes. For this, it integrates
    with container management tools (Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, ...) It
    acts as an additional layer above those tools on multiple user systems
    where users do not have Docker priviledges or knowledge.

Can we directly support these container management tools?  I’d like to
make GWL workflows very portable, so that there are only few runtime
requirements.  Depending on a cluster management tool to be configured
would be counter to this goal.

> Talking about ideas:
>  - what about the Content Adressable Store?

This already exists, but I’m not sure it’s sufficient.

>  - what about a bridge with CWL?

I’m open to this idea, but it would need to be well-defined.  What does
it really mean?  Generating CWL files from GWL workflows?  That really
shouldn’t be too hard.  Anything else, however, is hard for me to
imagine.

--
Ricardo