Seqera release first cloud product: Nextflow Tower

PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BARCELONA, SPAIN. 18 SEPTEMBER 2019. The team behind the leading open-source scientific workflow software Nextflow have released their first cloud product, Nextflow Tower. The company developing the technology, Seqera, made the announcement today to around 80 delegates at the annual Nextflow meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Since its release in 2013, Nextflow has made a significant impact on life sciences computation by enabling containerization of tasks and cloud deployment on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud as well as traditional grid computing infrastructure. The open-source software is used across the biopharma, clinical diagnostic and biotech industries with 25,000 monthly downloads.

In areas such as genetic testing, drug development and image analysis, scientists rely on complex data pipelines to process vast quantities of data generated by modern instrumentation. Scientific workflows enable the orchestration of software and data allowing the deployment across distributed and heterogeneous computing architecture. This has become of fundamental importance as the growing $32B HPC market migrates away from on-premise hardware and expands into the cloud.

Nextflow project leader Paolo Di Tommaso describes the motivations for the new software “Over the last 6 years, we have been on the frontline of production pipelines with Nextflow. This has given us insight into the most critical needs that workflow users have. Nextflow Tower has been designed with these insights as we work towards solving these open problems. Users wanted a database of all executions, monitoring of workflows and a seamless experience with Nextflow”.

Nextflow Tower is open-source software licensed under Mozilla Public License 2.0. “We wanted to keep with the open-source ethos of Nextflow,” says Evan Floden, co-founder of Seqera. “The communities that form around open-source are their strength. In the longer-term, we plan to release features such as optimized deployments, cloud budgeting and team management within an open-core model.”

Seqera is a Barcelona-based business actively maintaining and developing Nextflow. The company is a spin-off from the Centre for Genomic Regulation and was founded in July 2018, receiving private pre-seed funding in February of 2019. The Centre for Genomic Regulation is an international biomedical research institute of excellence, created in December 2000. It is a non-profit foundation funded by the Catalan Government through the Departments of Business & Knowledge, the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities, the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation, and includes the participation of Pompeu Fabra University.

Seqera is currently fundraising for seed investment.

Contact: info@seqera.io