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Version: 23.1

Compute environment overview

Overview​

Tower uses the concept of compute environments to define the execution platform where a pipeline will run. Compute environments enable Tower users to launch pipelines on a growing number of cloud and on-premise infrastructures.

Each compute environment must be configured to enable Tower to submit tasks. See the individual compute environment pages below for platform-specific configuration steps.

Platforms​

Select a default compute environment​

If you have more than one compute environment, you can select which one will be used by default when launching a pipeline.

  1. In a workspace, select Compute Environments.

  2. Select Make primary for a particular compute environment to make it your default.

GPU usage​

The process for provisioning GPU instances in your compute environment differs for each cloud provider.

AWS Batch​

The AWS Batch compute environment creation form in Tower includes an Enable GPUs option. This option makes it possible to run GPU-dependent workflows in the compute environment. Note that:

  • The Enable GPUs setting alone does not cause GPU instances to deploy in your compute environment. You must still specify GPU-enabled instance types in the Advanced options > Instance types field.

  • The Enable GPUs setting causes Batch Forge to specify the most current AWS-recommended GPU-optimized ECS AMI as the EC2 fleet AMI when creating the compute environment.

  • This setting can be overridden by AMI ID in the advanced options.

  • The NVIDIA Container Runtime uses environment variables in container images to specify a GPU accelerated container. These variables should be included in the containerOptions directive for each GPU-dependent process in your Nextflow script. For example:

process UseGPU {
    containerOptions '-e NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all'
}