# broadinstitute/cromwell

Scientific workflow engine designed for simplicity & scalability. Trivially transition between one off use cases to massive scale production environments

Repository: https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/cromwell
Homepage: http://cromwell.readthedocs.io/
Language: Scala
License: BSD-3-Clause
License Family: permissive
Topics: workflow-execution, workflow, cloud, hpc, bioinformatics, executor, scala, docker, ga4gh, containers, wdl, workflow-description-language, application
Last push: 2026-09-02T17:24:41+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 80/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 100, release rhythm 44, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4156, "days_push": 0, "days_rel": 215, "gap_med": 93.0, "n_releases_24m": 5}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1080, forks 381 (observed 2026-09-03T02:15:09.672123+00:00)

## What it is
Cromwell is an open-source Workflow Management System from the Broad Institute that executes scientific workflows written in WDL (Workflow Description Language). It scales from single one-off runs to massive production environments via modular backends for cloud (AWS Batch, GCP Batch) and HPC execution.

## Use cases
- run WDL bioinformatics workflows at scale
- execute genomics pipelines on AWS or GCP
- self-host a workflow engine for scientific pipelines
- transition from local one-off workflow runs to production-scale execution
- run WDL workflows on HPC clusters
- manage reproducible bioinformatics pipeline execution

## When to choose
- your pipelines are written in WDL
- you need to scale scientific workflows from a laptop to cloud or HPC
- you want a battle-tested engine with Broad Institute backing and Terra compatibility

## When to avoid
- you need CWL support (dropped in Cromwell 80+)
- you prefer Nextflow or Snakemake ecosystems
- you need vendor support for non-AWS/GCP backends, which are community-maintained

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: workflow-automation, scheduling, container-runtime, cloud
- domain: bioinformatics, cloud-computing
- platform: jvm, cloud, self-hosted
- tags: wdl, workflow-engine, workflow-management-system, hpc, ga4gh, scala, scientific-workflows, backend-pluggable, data-engineering, automation, docker, linux

## Member repositories
- broadinstitute/cromwell (main) score 80

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-09-03T02:15:09.672123+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:51:26.884932+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell (fetched 2026-09-03T02:15:09.672123+00:00, sha c355ffb2b613)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.