Research facilities

Bioinformatics Facility

Application: The purpose of the facility is to provide computational biology support to students and researchers at the Institute of Biology. We maintain several servers that support bioinformatics research and education within IBL and its collaborators. These servers are not intended to replace the ALICE HPC cluster at Leiden University, but to provide a smaller, more flexible environment for research and teaching, as well as hands-on training for biology researchers.
Availability: All students and researchers involved in a research or educational project within IBL, or affiliated with IBL, are welcome to use our facility.
Location: Sylvius
Sylviusweg 72
2333 BE Leiden
Contact: Chao Du

Location

The main servers are located on the 5th floor, wing 5 of the Sylvius Building, where we also have an office space for in-person discussions.
We strongly encourage remote access to the servers.

Available servers

All servers can be accessed using the same user account.

For the most up-to-date specifications, visit IBL Bioinformatics Wikipedia.

BLIS

CPU: Intel® Core™ i9-10980XE @ 3.00GHz (18 cores / 36 threads)
Memory: 256 GB ECC
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 (8 GB)
Storage:
/home/ 2 TB SSD (20 GB quota per user)
/vol/local/ 7 TB HDD

BILBO

CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5955WX @ 4.0GHz (16 cores / 32 threads)
Memory: 256 GB ECC
GPU: NVIDIA T1000 (8 GB)
Storage:
/home/ 1 TB SSD (20 GB quota per user)
/vol/local/ 12 TB HDD
/vol/local1/ 4 TB SSD
/vol/local2/ 4 TB HDD

Connected desktop computers

Several standard desktop computers are connected to the same network as our servers, with identical software setups. They can be used to test programs and configurations or download large datasets.

Note: these desktops do not use ECC memory, so long-running jobs may occasionally produce errors. These servers are: VBLIS, DINGLAB01.

Raspberry Pi

We also provide several Raspberry Pi mini-computers in the student office next to the main servers — ideal for practicing Linux skills.

Getting Access

To request access, please fill in this form, we will respond with detailed instructions.

Rules and Regulations

Remember: feel free to test and explore — the servers are built to be robust. If you somehow break something, that’s our problem, not yours!

However, please keep in mind that this is a shared resource. To ensure fair use, follow these guidelines.

During your work, you may encounter limits due to restricted administrative rights — this is part of the training, and we are here to help. You will learn how to install and manage software as a non-administrator. This ensures the servers remain stable and available to all users.