2026-09-13 –, D.0.03
Founded in 2021, The Armenian Bioinformatics Institute (ABI) is a research institute
focused on the development and application of computational data analysis
methods to human, plant, and bacterial genomics.
Like any other research institute, ABI needs servers to compute, storage to
store and networking to connect systems and data together.
While initially everything was a "house of madness" with mix of VMs on the
cloud, bare-metals with single user authentication and duct-taped networking,
the IT team decided to move everything to a FreeBSD backbone, with bhyve for
computing and data saved on ZFS.
In this talk we explore how we use FreeBSD in bioinformatics, how jails and
ZFS help us to maintain our infrastructure and critical, original data,
stories of issues we had over the last year (during my time), experiments in
the last 2-3 years (before my time), issues the lab encountered (before our
time) and problems we see till this day.
The talk also has a list of software that's needed by bioninformatics field
which are lacking on FreeBSD, bhyve/jails suggestions that would make our
lives easier and problems we encountered while trying to setup a FreeBSD-only
HPC environment.
I am Varinka Ohanyan, a system administrator at the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute in Yerevan, where I maintain an all-FreeBSD-based-but-actually-Linux HPC cluster for genomic research. I manage Star Wars-themed servers running bhyve virtual machines for compute and FreeBSD jails for infrastructure services - including LDAP, DNS, web hosting, wikis, ticketing, and a few other prisoners. My days are spent keeping Slurm-scheduled nodes healthy for scientists, maintaining ZFS storage and backups with zelta, and helping researchers with whatever problems they create for themselves. I document things on our internal but public wiki and aspire to one day become a competent porter. Other than that, I study bad engineering at the American University of Armenia and am awful at math.