Evaluating Workflow Management Systems: A Bioinformatics Use Case

Biological knowledge discovery is a tedious task which relies on computationally intensive analyses to process huge volumes of data and metadata. This task can be facilitated by a well-designed workflow management system, capable of deploying and efficiently orchestrating the scientific analysis. However choosing the right workflow management system remains a critical challenge. In this study, we propose ten metrics for evaluating the efficiency of workflow management systems, and show how the Pegasus-mpi-cluster and Snakemake workflow management systems gave the best overall performance, closely followed by Nextflow.