Trellis for efficient data and task management in the VA Million Veteran Program

Biomedical studies have become larger in size and yielded large quantities of data, yet efficient data processing remains a challenge. Here we present Trellis, a cloud-based data and task management framework that completely automates the process from data ingestion to result presentation, while tracking data lineage, facilitating information query, and supporting fault-tolerance and scalability. Using a graph database to coordinate the state of the data processing workflows and a scalable microservice architecture to perform bioinformatics tasks, Trellis has enabled efficient variant calling on 100,000 human genomes collected in the VA Million Veteran Program.