Over 200 workflow systems have been developed to date. Like any other software tools, many workflow systems are actively evolving with new features added from time to time. The goal of this blog post is to illustrate, by means of comparison to some of the most popular workflow systems similar to SoS, features and limitations of SoS as a conventional workflow system. It should be seen as a check-list of basic workflow features, in addition to the unique niche SoS places itself in the realm of workflow systems as explained in the next section and in other posts. Read more

Because of the needs to use libraries and tools in different languages and to execute them on different systems such as computer clusters, bioinformaticians write a lot of scripts in different languages and face many challenges in developing, running, managing, sharing, and reproducing bioinformatic data analyses. Notably, Management of scripts: With increasing number of scripts, some in multiple versions, some shared among projects, some written for and executed on remote systems, it can be difficult to share data analyses with others, and reproduce prior data analyses at a later time. Read more