The CGB Bioinformatics Portal is operated by the Bioinformatics Core staff (Amanda Hemmerich, Chris Hemmerich, Phillip Steinbachs, and Luke Jarymowcyz). The core staff are responsible for maintaining a variety of production bioinformatics services and applications, in addition to designing, implementing, and maintaining the computing infrastructure around which these resources are built.

The CGB Bioinformatics Core recognizes a distinction between development and production resources, and has adopted this common enterprise "best practice" philosophy for its projects. The development component consists of a separate hardware and software environment in which projects are initially designed, developed, and tested by our research scientists. After a beta stage of development is reached, we evaluate the project to see how it best fits into our core service offerings. If the project proves viable for public use, the core staff integrate the application into the production environment. Additional development changes made for a production project undergo a similar evaluation procedure.

The production component refers to a "live" 24x7x365 service that is in use by our customers, both internal and external to the CGB. Because many scientists depend on these services for their daily research, it is critical that we provide a professional, consistent, and stable production environment. Before any project is moved into production, the core staff must thoroughly document and test the service in a real-world usage scenario. If any major problems are discovered, the core staff works with our research scientists until the production criteria are satisfied. Only then will we make the service available to the larger life science community.

The majority of our projects and services make use of free and open source software, and to a lesser extent some commercial software offerings. A sampling of this software would include the Apache web server, several types of relational database systems (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL), source code revision control (CVS, subversion, arch), multiple programming and scripting languages (C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Python, shell, PHP, Perl), and other in-house applications for managing systems and installed software. For our core computing services, we use and support several Unix based operating system platforms, including Solaris, Linux, and MacOS X.

For more information regarding our bioinformatics consulting and services, interested parties should contact Jennifer Steinbachs.

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