Astrocyte - The BioHPC Workflow System

Astrocyte is a scientific workflow platform developed by BioHPC at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, designed to:

• Allow bioinformaticians to share their scientific workflows and visualizations with users, without needing to perform sophisticated web development tasks.
• Allow users to quickly and easily run these workflows via a simple web interface, and to easily upload and download data.
• Provide archival versions of previous workflows, in order to ensure that a given workflow will be available even if further development takes place.
• Use the BioHPC cluster resources efficiently, without complex optimization.

The documentation for Astrocyte is broken down into 3 categories.

• Overview - An overview of Astrocyte - its features, terminology.
• User’s Guide - How to use the Astrocyte web interface. A guide for users who want to run Astrocyte workflows, or for those looking to familiarize themselves with the usage of Astrocyte online.
• Workflow Developer’s Guide - How to write workflows for Astrocyte. Aimed at bioinformaticians, this documentation gives an introduction to the structure of Astrocyte packages, the Nextflow workflow language, etc.