Features Archives - Page 4 of 4

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. […]

Community-maintained Notebook environments in Terra

Adrian Sharma October 1, 2020

Ever since we introduced Jupyter Notebooks in Terra, we’ve sought to provide default environments pre-loaded with software packages that are likely to interest you, to minimize the amount of setup necessary to get your work going. However, we’ve found that there’s a huge amount of variation in the needs and preferences of researchers, from […]

Update to Jupyter Notebook environment in Terra : Persistent Disk storage now available

Adrian Sharma September 21, 2020

This week, we released one of those changes that looks small on the face of it but is actually a really big deal. Specifically, we upgraded the cloud environment (previously called “runtime”) that we provide in Terra for running Jupyter Notebooks to support persistent disk storage. Until now, one of the limitations of our […]

Terra videos on YouTube

Geraldine Van der Auwera September 15, 2020

What do the Teen Titans and a German docu-series called Terra X have in common? That’s right, they’re the top hits you get on Google when you search for “Terra intro videos YouTube”. So, you might have already searched for Terra videos and come up empty; or you might have used […]

Delete intermediates option now available for Workflows in Terra

Kyle Vernest July 21, 2020

Intermediate files generated by your workflow may be an unexpected source of storage costs. Fortunately, you now have an easy option to delete these files immediately after your workflow runs. Just select the new “delete intermediate outputs” box on your workflow configuration. Saving money on your workflow analysis is always a top […]

Faster creation of Notebook environments with Google Compute Engine VMs

Adrian Sharma July 17, 2020

We know that the 4 minutes it takes to create a cloud environment to perform a Jupyter Notebook analysis can feel like a long time. To reduce this time and save you cost, Terra has added support for using standard Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines (GCE VMs) as the underlying compute/runtime. Terra researchers […]

Improving Job Manager functionality on Terra

Ruchi Munshi September 3, 2019

We can probably all agree that the main point of running analyses in the form of workflows is to automate as much of it as you can. So when something goes wrong, you want to be able to identify the nature of the problem as quickly and easily as possible. Today we wanted […]

Workflow worries to working WDLs in under a week

Allie Cliffe July 19, 2019

How insightful feedback about the GATK showcase led to a flurry of updates and the creation of a suite of format conversion tools. Last June, just as we were putting the final touches on the teaching materials for a 4-day GATK workshop that we were planning to run entirely on Terra, we received […]