BioBuilds: A Model for Long Term Sustainability of Open Source Bioinformatics

Open Source software continues to play an important role in genomics, providing many of the scientific software tools used to analyze sequencing data. As sequencing continues to gain traction in industrial and clinical environments, users face productivity challenges from the effort required to install and maintain Open Source tools, as well as uncertainty about their regulatory acceptability, due in part to the lack of provenance, support, and verification services.BioBuilds, sponsored by Lab7 Systems, IBM, Intel and Continuum Analytics, is a self-contained, turnkey solution for deploying pre-built binaries of common Open Source bioinformatics tools that significantly reduces support and maintenance efforts.

Since its initial release in 2013, BioBuilds has grown into a large, community-driven solution with over 75 packages supported across three hardware architectures (x86, POWER8, and ARM7) on Linux and OS X. BioBuilds uses Continuum's Conda package manager to manage distributions. Users can create and share customized installations containing only needed applications and their dependencies, while still relying on a single source for pre-built binaries, simplifying reproducibility efforts.All BioBuilds packages are RSA-signed and checksummed, making verification and certification of computational environments easier. As with all previous releases, BioBuilds remains free and open. Build recipes for all packages are publicly available on GitHub, and we encourage contributions from the community.

The latest updates continue to support our mission of ensuring that Open Source bioinformatics tools remain readily available and accessible for a broad range of research, industrial, and clinical applications.