Links:
Meta-port for Biostar Handbook tools URL: https://www.freshports.org/biology/biostar-tools/
Simple, Portable Cluster Manager URL: https://acadix.biz/spcm.php
Desktop-installer URL: https://acadix.biz/desktop-installer.php

Contact: Jason Bacon <jwb@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Yuri Victorovich <yuri@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD has long provided a solid foundation for scientific computing, with its remarkable reliability, network and storage performance, and the FreeBSD ports system which not only provides an extensive collection of scientific software, but also facilitates optimized installation by allowing the user to easily install from source with additional compiler flags.

Last quarter saw the introduction of sysutils/spcm (Simple, Portable Cluster Manager), an integrated tool set for building and managing HPC (High Performance Computing) clusters based on FreeBSD.

This quarter we saw rapid growth in the biology category, much of which culminated in the completion of the biology/biostar-tools metaport. This metaport installs virtually all of the software needed by bioinformatician in training. It is now easier for bioinformatics students to install and run the software they need on FreeBSD than on any other platform. Bioinformatics is the analysis of biological data such as gene and protein sequences.

We also hit a milestone of 200 ports in the biology category, thanks to contributions from 21 maintainers. Software installation has always been and still is a major hurdle for many researchers. Far too often, researchers attempt "cave man" installations, following primitive instructions from the developers' site for manually running configure scripts and make. In many other cases, they struggle with low-quality application containers or third-party on package managers that are prone to failures and difficult to use. Problems installing the software they need often cause major delays in their research and often end in failure. The rapid growth of scientific software in the FreeBSD ports collection, coupled with the introduction of SPCM and numerous improvements to sysutils/desktop-installer, have removed many hurdles that could delay or prevent scientific discovery.