Embrapa Bioinformatic Multi-user Laboratory

Recently Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) implemented the Embrapa Bioinformatic Multi-user Laboratory(LMB) that provides a central point of convergency for related bioinformatics issues in the organization, a high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to be used by employees and partners on solution of computational intensive problems in bioinformatics, and principally, provides specialized collaborators to realize training, assist the elaboration of projects with bioinformatics components and in specific cases contribute to  execute them.

The importance of LMB is best understood when one takes into account the way Embrapa research centers are geographically located. The research centers are distributed among the several regions of the  Brazil, and bioinformatic becames necessary in many of the projects developed all over the centers, most using considerable computational resources. How is inviable to replicate the HPC infrastructure in every locations, the practical solution is concentrate computational resources at a unique point and provide remote access to them.  At human resources perspective, Embrapa has bioinformatics professionals working directly in the units, and is very important ensure they will communicate appropriately. LMB is a convergent point for bioinformaticians in the organization. Finally, The LMB has critical mass to explore complex problems in bioinformatics area.

LMB´s infrastructure includes two HPC servers, each one with 512 GB RAM and 48 cores; one storage system and one tape library for backup. The users can execute their jobs by directly accessing the system through a ssh connection or using the Galaxy web system. LMB is also committed to education and training in bioinformatics by providing workshops and courses.