Workflow Visualization

BEE includes a simple command for viewing BEE workflows. By using the beeflow dag $ID $OUTPUT_DIR command, you can view the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of any submitted workflow.

Creating DAGs

The dag command can be run at any point of the workflow, and can be run multiple times. To see the DAG of a workflow before it runs, submit the workflow with the --no-start flag and then use the dag command. The DAGs are exported in PNG format to $OUTPUT_DIR/$WD_ID-dags by default. If the no-dag-dir flag is specified when the dag command is run, the DAG will be exported to $OUTPUT_DIR. The dag command makes multiple versions of the DAGs. The most recent version is $WF_ID.png and the others are $WD_ID_v1.png, $WF_ID_v2.png … where v1 is the oldest. The graphmls used to make the DAGs are saved in the workflow archive and are saved with their version number. These graphmls can be useful for debugging when there are errors creating the DAGs.

Example DAG

The DAG below was created by running the dag command while the cat-grep-tar example workflow was running.

_images/cat-dag.png

The orange bubbles are inputs, the blue bubbles are task states, the red bubbles are tasks, and the green bubbles are outputs. The graph is in a hierarchical format, meaning that tasks that are higher up in the graph run before the ones below them.