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add wdl-genomics-on-ray template: WDL Genomics Workflow for bioinformatics - #951

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add wdl-genomics-on-ray template: WDL Genomics Workflow for bioinformatics#951
em-anyscale wants to merge 4 commits into
anyscale:mainfrom
em-anyscale:add/wdl-genomics-on-ray

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@em-anyscale em-anyscale commented Aug 11, 2026

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Runs WDL (Workflow Description Language) workflows on Anyscale.

WDL is the language of GATK Best Practices, WARP and Terra, and a large share of
production bioinformatics is written in it. This template adapts the Broad Institute's ONT assembly pipeline [link, pinned to 02089d9] and ships a miniwdl container backend
that runs each WDL task as a Ray task, so tasks bin-pack onto the cluster instead of
each waiting on a VM boot.

  • Adds the wdl-genomics-on-ray template: a miniwdl container backend registered
    through a Python entry point, selected with [scheduler] container_backend = ray.
  • Maps runtime {} onto Ray resources, including Cromwell/GCE spellings (gpuCount,
    gpuType, disks), and routes Ray node loss to the WDL's own runtime.preemptible.
  • Four container modes, since Ray already runs inside a container and podman run
    fails at container-init exec: none (cluster image), ray (per-task image_uri),
    miniwdl's own backends, and native.
  • Dockerfile and tools/manifest.toml pinning the toolchain by version, URL and sha256.
  • Compute configs for AWS and GCP (aws.yaml, gce.yaml).
  • README.ipynb example walking the pipeline end to end on the GIAB Ashkenazi trio: three samples in 8m05s against 7m52s for the slowest single sample, on three workers.
  • persist_outputs.py, because an Anyscale Job terminates its cluster on success and
    /mnt/cluster_storage goes with it.

self and others added 4 commits August 10, 2026 21:50
- Introduced the `wdl-genomics-on-ray` template enabling WDL workflows to run on Ray, optimizing resource utilization on autoscaling clusters.
- Added Dockerfile to build a custom Ray-compatible image, including necessary tools, libraries, and dependencies for the workflow.
- Configured setup for both AWS and GCP environments with corresponding compute configurations (`aws.yaml`, `gce.yaml`).
- Added README.ipynb notebook for quick start and detailed documentation on running WDL genomic workflows.
- Added example workflows utilizing GIAB Ashkenazi trio data, demonstrating concurrent task execution via Ray’s autoscaling capabilities.
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