Geraldine Van der Auwera, Author at Terra

Introducing task-level checkpointing in workflows

Geraldine Van der Auwera January 26, 2021

If your day-to-day involves workflows with long-running tasks, I have good news for you: we just released a new checkpointing feature that makes it possible to save intermediate outputs for a task and resume work from that point if the task gets interrupted. For context, the Cromwell workflow engine we use in Terra already had a smart resume capability at the level of the workflow, called “call caching”.

Try out RStudio in Terra

Geraldine Van der Auwera January 22, 2021

What better way to keep the rstudio::global(2021) party going than to share a video showing how to use RStudio in Terra? Yes, you read that right, RStudio is available in Terra! Specifically, we provide a cloud environment pre-configured to run the server version of RStudio, as an alternative (or complement) to Jupyter Notebooks. […]

A must-read review paper for getting started with bioinformatics workflows

Geraldine Van der Auwera January 15, 2021

New year, new partnership… and a new blog series focusing on highlighting papers that we think will be of interest to many of you. For this first iteration, we review a review paper (review-ception!) fresh off the virtual press over at GigaScience, coming out of C. Titus Brown’s lab at UC Davis, on the topic of workflow systems.

Blue skies ahead: An exciting new horizon for Terra with Microsoft

Geraldine Van der Auwera January 11, 2021

We are taking the next step in our journey by joining our efforts with Microsoft, a partner that truly needs no introduction. This multi-year partnership will bring together advanced technologies, industry expertise, and scale to accelerate the next generation of the Terra platform for health and life sciences research. […]

Welcome to the new Terra website

Geraldine Van der Auwera January 5, 2021

Happy New Year and welcome back to all of you who have been enjoying a period of holidays! And to everyone else, we hope you get a break soon. Not to put too much pressure on 2021, but we have high hopes for this new year. So what better way to get started than with a new informational website for Terra? […]

A demo workspace for working with gnomAD data in Terra

Geraldine Van der Auwera November 5, 2020

Last week we were very excited for our colleagues in the gnomAD team, who announced on their blog that the entire gnomAD dataset is now available for direct use or download from Google Cloud as well as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. If you’re not familiar with gnomAD, the name stands for Genome Aggregation […]

Dealing with different data models: challenges and solutions

Geraldine Van der Auwera October 30, 2020

In my last blog post, I gave an overview of how Terra’s data tables can help you streamline and scale up your data processing operations through the use of a data model that describes your dataset in a structured way. In this follow-up, I want to touch on some of the thornier questions that […]

New resources for unlocking the power of Terra’s Data tables

Geraldine Van der Auwera October 28, 2020

“This is not a question. I just wanted to say that I’ve avoided learning how to use Terra Data tables for a long time, primarily because I’ve used workflows that require sample sheet files, but I finally got to try it out and I must say it was quite powerful.” — A computational scientist, in […]

The freedom of portable workflows

Geraldine Van der Auwera October 20, 2020

One of the foundational principles of Terra is that it’s designed to be an open ecosystem, not a walled garden — there are no lock-in mechanisms. If after a while you decide to leave, you can take all the analysis tooling you’ve been using here and expect it to still be […]

Terra at ASHG 2020: Workshop plans and a video preview

Geraldine Van der Auwera October 15, 2020

Every year we run a workshop at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics, and it’s a highlight of our year for many reasons. My favorite aspect of it is that we use the ASHG workshop to drive development of brand new educational materials and resources, and sometimes […]