Computing in Science & Engineering | , Vol 26: pp. 30-39
The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Task Execution Service (TES) application programming interface (API) is a standardized schema and API for describing and executing batch execution tasks. It provides a common way to submit and manage tasks to a variety of compute environments, including on-premises high-performance computing and high-throughput computing systems, cloud computing platforms, and hybrid environments. The TES API is designed to be flexible and extensible, allowing it to be adapted to a wide range of use cases, such as “bringing compute to the data” solutions for federated and distributed data analysis, or load balancing across multicloud infrastructures. This API has been adopted by numerous different service providers and is utilized by several workflow engines, yielding a single abstracted interface for developers and researchers. Using its capabilities, genome research institutes are building extensible hybrid compute systems to study life science.
This project is an implementation of the GA4GH Task Execution Service (TES), that provides distributed batch task execution on Microsoft Azure. The TES API is an effort to define a standardized schema and API for describing batch execution tasks. A task defines a set of input files, a set of Docker containers and commands to run, a set of output files, and some other logging and metadata.
