Service

Marine Bioinformatics

The marine bioinformatics facility allows users to analyze omics data (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabarcoding, etc.) in a High-Performance computing cluster. MARBITS is the marine bioinformatics platform. It has a total of 396 computing cores (CPUs; 792 with hyperthreading), 4.6 T of RAM, and 830 T of shared storage. Depending on their needs, users are given storage, computation and RAM usage quotas. The previous parameters are monitored to register the usage that they make of the infrastructure, which is billed on a regular basis.

The facility has a bioinformatics technician that works as a system administrator and also carries out training sessions for the users. The service manages users, groups of users and their associated permissions and installs and manages third-party software and biological databases. Additionally, a backup for user's data is provided, even though the user is still responsible for keeping an ex-situ backup copy. The platform advice users on how to upload and store data in public repositories, such as ENA or NCBI. The platform offers users a basic formation in UNIX computing environments, as well as on several applications on computational biology. It also develops small pieces of custom software and bioinformatics pipelines.

The platform also provides advice about the design of Data Management Plans that follow the FAIR principles as requested by EU and Spanish projects.

MARBITS

Technical resources and equipment
  • High Performance Computing cluster. One master/login node (Fujitsu Primergy RX2530 M2 server) and 22 high performance computing nodes with a total of 396 physical cores and 4.6 T of RAM (10 x Supermicro, 12 x IBM iDataPlex). It has 830 T of storage in a shared parallel distributed filesystem.
  • 3 DELL workstations: DELL PowerEdge T710 servers with 2 x 4-core Intel Xeon E5620 processors, 16-60G of RAM and 1 x 2T hard drive.