DDBJ Database updates and computational infrastructure enhancement

The Bioinformation and DDBJ Center (https://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) in the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) maintains a primary nucleotide sequence database as a member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) in partnership with the US National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. The NIG operates the NIG supercomputer as a computational basis for the construction of DDBJ databases and as a large-scale computational resource for Japanese biologists and medical researchers. In order to accommodate the rapidly growing amount of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) nucleotide sequence data, NIG replaced its supercomputer system, which is designed for big data analysis of genome data, in early 2019. The new system is equipped with 30 PB of DNA data archiving storage; large-scale parallel distributed file systems (13.8 PB in total) and 1.1 PFLOPS computation nodes and graphics processing units (GPUs). Moreover, as a starting point of developing multi-cloud infrastructure of bioinformatics, we have also installed an automatic file transfer system that allows users to prevent data lock-in and to achieve cost/performance balance by exploiting the most suitable environment from among the supercomputer and public clouds for different workloads.