Moving a Cromwell WDL workflow to GCP. Cromwell appears to really love using the “e” (for “efficiency”, i.e. slow and worthless) machine types. I had a task of “extract 6 ~10gb compressed files, then process them”, that I ran on both “e2-highcpu-8” and “n2-standard-8” machines.

The n2-standard-8 took an hour and a half. The e2-highcpu-8 took three and a half hours.

Given that we’re paying for the 700GiB of disk space in addition to the machine, it’s a clear loss using the “e” machine.

Is it documented any place how to tell cromwell gcp batch which machine “family” to use?