Café Guix : Reproducible computation using Guix and CWL

18 nov. 2025

En ligne

mardi 25 Novembre à 13h00

Arun Isaac viendra nous parler de workflow et de Guix et ce rendez-vous aura lieu en anglais sur le lien suivant : https://meet.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/b/cel-dyj-m93-arv.

Résumé : Traditionally, HPC jobs are submitted as bash scripts to a batch scheduler. These scripts invariably involve specifics of the HPC system, and are not reproducible. This approach also requires micro-management and manual bookkeeping of input, output and temporary files—it is not at the right level of abstraction for scientists thinking about their science.
Guix, the functional package manager that we love and use, offers strong reproucibility guarantees and precise tracking of software provenance. Workflow languages such as the Common Workflow Language (CWL) abstract away the manual bookkeeping, and provide a description of the workflow that is easily reproduced on other systems. In addition, CWL being a specification, it is easy to implement runners that are standards compliant but run on different execution environments—single machine, HPC cluster and cloud alike.
In this talk, I will describe and demo a reproducible computational stack built on ccwl, ravanan and Guix. ccwl, the Concise Common Workflow Language, is a workflow language that compiles to the Common Workflow Language. ravanan is a CWL runner that runs on HPC clusters and uses Guix to facilitate reproducible computation. ravanan caches all intermediate outputs. And, thanks to Guix’s robust hashing of the entire dependency tree, ravanan’s cache is guaranteed to never go stale: thus you never have to recompute any step and never fear that your cache may be stale.

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