The Bioinformatics Centre at the BRIC-Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) was established in May 2002 under the Biotechnology Information System Network (BTISNet) initiative of the Department of Biotechnology. Over the years, the Advanced Bioinformatics Centre has evolved into a state-of-the-art computational facility, currently supported by the Department of Biotechnology and the Ministry of Earth Sciences under the Deep Ocean Mission programme, with a dedicated focus on marine bioinformatics.
The facility is equipped with advanced high-performance computing infrastructure, including multiple compute nodes, dedicated GPU featuring next-generation architectures, and large-scale memory resources to support data-intensive analyses. Along with this, there are high-end workstations with advanced computational capabilities, enabling seamless integration of computational workflows ranging from large-scale genomics to molecular modelling and artificial intelligence applications.
The Centre provides comprehensive computational support to research activities at ILS, spanning functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, multi-omics integration, drug designing and discovery. With the integration of modern approaches such as deep learning and artificial intelligence, the Centre plays a pivotal role in enabling data-driven discovery across diverse domains of life sciences, from fundamental biology to translational research.
Main Thrust Area
The Bioinformatics Centre at ILS advances interdisciplinary research by integrating multi-omics, computational biology, and data science to address complex biological and biomedical challenges. The Centre combines high-throughput data analysis with modern computational approaches, including artificial intelligence and systems modelling, to generate predictive insights across multiple biological scales.
Facilities
Computational Infrastructure
The Advanced Bioinformatics Centre at ILS hosts a state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) facility designed to support large-scale data analysis and advanced computational research in life sciences.
HPC Cluster Architecture
- 6 high-performance compute nodes (128 CPU cores per node)
- Dedicated 2 GPU nodes equipped with next-generation accelerators, including NVIDIA H100 (2×) and NVIDIA DGX (8× H200)
- ~7 TB of aggregated system memory
- 1.1 PB storage capacity
- Workstations
- 7 advanced workstations equipped with NVIDIA A6000 GPUs
- Several high-performance workstations and computers
System Environment
The Bioinformatics Centre operates a Linux-based (Rocky Linux) high-performance computing (HPC) ecosystem with robust workload management through the SLURM scheduler, enabling efficient job scheduling and scalable resource allocation. The infrastructure supports containerized workflows using Apptainer (Singularity) and Docker, ensuring portability, reproducibility, and streamlined deployment of complex computational pipelines.
To facilitate flexible and reproducible research, the Centre maintains a centralized Anaconda-based software environment, seamlessly integrated with the Lmod module management system. This framework enables efficient dependency management, version control, and dynamic switching among multiple software stacks, thereby providing a scalable, user-friendly, and standardised computational environment for diverse bioinformatics and data science applications.
Software & Computational Pipelines
AlphaFold 3, OpenEYE, Schrödinger, NVIDIA Parabricks, CryoSPARC, Relion Cryo EM, GROMACS, NAMD, VMD and many other open-source software for genomics, modeling and simulation.
The Bioinformatics Centre also has a dedicated open-source as well as custom automated pipeline for WGS and Metagenomics assembly and annotation (Snakemake), Chemoinformatics pipeline, and automated pipelines for all types of NGS analysis (NextFlow).
Team Members
Faculty & Scientists
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Research Scholars
IT & Administration
Activities (Training Programs and Workshops)
Seven Days ILS Genomics/Transcriptomics Data Analysis Workshop 2025, 7th–12th July 2025.
Whole Genome Sequencing Analysis Workshop, 11th–13th February, 2026.