nextflow.processor

The nextflow.processor package implements the execution and monitoring of tasks.

Class Diagram

Note

Some classes may be excluded from the above diagram for brevity.

Notes

While the executor package defines how tasks are submitted to a particular execution backend (such as an HPC scheduler), the processor package defines how tasks are created and executed. As such, these packages work closely together, and in fact several components of the Executor interface, specifically the TaskHandler and TaskMonitor, are defined in this package.

The TaskProcessor is by far the largest and most complex class in this package. It implements both the dataflow operator for a given process as well as the task execution logic. In other words, it defines the mapping from an abstract process definition with input and output channels into concrete task executions.

A TaskRun represents a particular task execution. There is also TaskBean, which is a serializable representation of a task. Legends say that TaskBean was originally created to support a “daemon” mode in which Nextflow would run on both the head node and the worker nodes, so the Nextflow “head” would need to send tasks to the Nextflow “workers”. This daemon mode was never completed, but echoes of it remain (see CmdNode, DaemonLauncher, and the nf-ignite plugin).

When a TaskProcessor receives a set of input values, it creates a TaskRun and submits it to an Executor, which in turn submits the task to a underlying execution backend. The executor’s TaskMonitor then monitors the status of the task, and when it is completed, returns it to the task processor for finalization. If the task completed successfully, the task processor collects the task outputs and emits them on the corresponding output channels. If the task failed, the task processor will retry it if possible, or else return a task error to the workflow run.