Conditional process resources

Problem

A task in your workflow needs to use some amount of computing resources (e.g. memory) that depends on the size or the name of one or more input files.

Solution

Declare the resource requirements (memory, cpus, etc.) in a dynamic manner using a closure.

The closure computes the required amount of resources using the file attributes (e.g. size) of the inputs declared in the process definition.

Code

process foo {
    memory { reads.size() < 70.KB ? 1.GB : 5.GB }

    input:
    path reads

    """
    echo your_command_here --in ${reads} --mem=${task.memory.giga}
    """
}

workflow {
    Channel.fromPath("$baseDir/data/reads/*_1.fq.gz", checkIfExists:true) \
        | foo
}

Run it

nextflow run nextflow-io/patterns/conditional-resources.nf