BIONIX – a Solaris based Platform for Computational Biology Abhishek Pratap1 Prateek Singh2

1 VIT University, Vellore, TN 632014 India [email protected] 2 VIT University, Vellore, TN 632014 India [email protected]

Keywords: Live CD, operating system, Integrated Workbench, Software.

Bionix is an integrated software workbench, developed for bioinformaticians and computational biologists. Bioinx is a remastered version of Belenix with open source based bioinformatics applications being integrated with the kernel. The fact that distinguishes Bionix from other open source software’s is the performance based on the most advanced operating system technology, Solaris platform with feature like ZFS(128 bit File System), DTrace (Dynamic Tracing Framework), Zones (Multiple application can run in isolation), SMF (Service Management Framework for handling dependencies). There has been significant reduction in the boot time and memory requirements with on the fly compression techniques being used. It is independent of host operating system. It may provide an ad-hoc solution where no Solaris is installed and has the capability of forming a virtual cluster lab in minutes with auto network detection. The entire Emboss package has been remodeled with graphical and onscreen help options, the NCBI toolkit with all flavors of blast and utilities like entrez search and sequin where a biologist can search or submit a sequence without going to web interface, molecular visualization tools like RasMol and Garlic; and a Perl module, bioperl for application development. The work on parallel computing with Bionix is in progress. The entire project has been coordinated with Asia Pacific Science and Technology Center, , Singapore. The initial release of the Bionix is slated for June, 2007.