Add institutional config for Digital Research Alliance of Canada clusters

[MareikeJaniak]

Small quality of life improvement for users who use nextflow on the clusters managed by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Adding a constitutional config for use on these clusters. (To be completed by me as part of 2025 Nextflow Hackathon).

[poquirion]

We probably want to have some grouping of the clusters profiles such as alliance.beluga, alliance.rorqual, etc

[MareikeJaniak]

That's the idea, it would be -profile alliance_canada,beluga. Current drafts:
https://github.com/MareikeJaniak/configs/blob/drac_profile/conf/alliance_canada.config
https://github.com/MareikeJaniak/configs/blob/drac_profile/docs/alliance_canada.md

[jfy133]

Note that we are starting to discourage the use of subprofiles as apparently occasionally issues can crop up with those (particularly user confusion with profile order).

It is fine to make separate independent config files

-profile alliance_beluga
-profile alliance_rorqual

It also helps keep docs a bit separate as in other institutions each cluster l can have quite different specs/instructions etc

[MareikeJaniak]

Thanks for clarifying, James! In that case, we would have 4-5 separate config files for the Alliance clusters. They are quite similar overall, so would we have a single markdown doc or also have separate docs for each cluster? There wouldn't really be any differences on the doc level.

[jfy133]

I see. What are the main differences?

[MareikeJaniak]

Within the config files, the only difference is in the max_memory, max_cpus, and max_time parameters.

Deploying nextflow and nf-core is the same on all of the clusters, and users would just need to specify -profile alliance_canada_<cluster_name>, depending on where they're working. Happy to make separate docs if you think it's better.

My current draft of the docs file:
https://github.com/MareikeJaniak/configs/blob/drac_profile/docs/alliance_canada.md