SCHEMA

What is SCHEMA about?

SCHEMA is an open-source suite of services designed to simplify and standardize the execution of computational workloads on scientific clusters. It provides an integrated environment for managing computational resources, orchestrating virtual machines, and executing containerized analyses and workflows on demand. At its core, SCHEMA consists of two tightly coupled components. SCHEMA API offers a programmatic service for submitting, scheduling, and monitoring containerized tasks and multi-step workflows, enabling their execution in a controlled and scalable manner on shared infrastructures. Building on top of this service, SCHEMA Lab delivers a web-based user interface that allows users to interactively launch notebooks and containerized workflows, track execution progress, and manage experimental runs, while abstracting away the underlying complexity of cluster administration.

From the user’s perspective, SCHEMA significantly lowers the barrier to reproducible and interoperable computational research. By relying on containerized execution, SCHEMA ensures that analyses are performed in fully specified and portable software environments, eliminating discrepancies caused by local configurations or dependency conflicts. This approach facilitates the reuse of computational workflows across projects, infrastructures, and research teams, while enabling transparent sharing of methods alongside results. At the same time, the combination of SCHEMA API and SCHEMA Lab provides flexibility for both programmatic automation and interactive exploration, supporting a wide range of use cases from routine analyses to exploratory research. Together, these capabilities promote robust, reproducible, and efficient scientific computation, aligned with modern best practices in open and collaborative research.

Availability

Currently SCHEMA is deployed in HYPATIA cloud service hosted by Athena Research Center. Access to HYPATIA is restricted to ELIXIR-GR community. However, SCHEMA will soon be deployed in the BIOINDUSTRY4.0 project compute environment, and access will be granted to the members of the project.

Tutorials

• https://gitlab.com/arc3972240/bioindustry/schemalab_tutorial