Which workflow execution engines support WDL What is Cromwell

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created by Geraldine_VdAuwera

on 2016-02-28

At the moment, Cromwell is the only fully-featured execution engine that we know of that supports WDL.

Cromwell

Cromwell is an open source (BSD 3-clause) execution engine written in Java that supports running WDL on three types of platform: local machine (e.g. your laptop), a local cluster/compute farm accessed via a job scheduler (e.g. GridEngine) or a cloud platform (e.g. Google Cloud or Amazon AWS). It is named after James Cromwell, the American actor and star of such great movies as Babe and Star Trek: First Contact -- hence its mascot, Jamie the warp pig.

The Cromwell executable is available as a pre-compiled jar file from the Cromwell GitHub repository. It requires Java 8 to run.

The basic command syntax is as follows:

java -jar cromwell.jar <action> <parameters>

More detailed examples of running WDLs via Cromwell are available in the Tutorials section of the WDL documentation.

For guidance on how to run WDLs via Cromwell on other platforms as well as additional technical details on Cromwell's capabilities, please see the Cromwell README in the GitHub repository.

Updated on 2017-07-29