Accumulating computational resource usage of genomic data analysis workflow to optimize cloud computing instance selection

Background: Container virtualization technologies such as Docker became popular in the bioinformatics domain as they improve portability and reproducibility of software deployment. Along with software packaged in containers, the workflow description standards Common Workflow Language also enabled to perform data analysis on multiple different computing environments with ease. These technologies accelerate the use of on-demand cloud computing platform which can scale out according to the amount of data. However, to optimize the time and the budget on a use of cloud, users need to select a suitable instance type corresponding to the resource requirements of their workflows. Results: We developed CWL-metrics, a system to collect runtime metrics of Docker containers and workflow metadata to analyze resource requirement of workflows. We demonstrated the analysis by using seven transcriptome quantification workflows on six instance types. The result showed instance type options of lower financial cost and faster execution time with required amount of computational resources. Conclusions: The summary of resource requirements of workflow executions provided by CWL-metrics can help users to optimize the selection of cloud computing instance. The runtime metrics data also accelerate to share workflows among different workflow management frameworks.