MARBITS is the marine bioinformatics platform of the Department of Marine Biology and Oceanography at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (Marine Sciences Institute; ICM-CSIC), Barcelona. It has a total of 396 computing cores (CPUs; 792 with hyperthreading), 4.6 T of RAM and 464 T of shared storage.

The seed of MARBITS started in 2010 with a DELL server with 16 computing cores and 16 G of RAM. It quickly grew up with 2 more workstations and an IBM iDataPlex High Performance Cluster in 2011. In the 2015 call it was awarded an infrastructures project from the Spanish MINEICO and European FEDER funding (CSIC15-EE-3579) and was upgraded with 240 state of the art cores and 3.6T of RAM.

Additionally, since 2015 there’s a bioinformatics technician that works as system administrator and also carries out several analyses for different projects and training sessions for the users. Also since 2015, MARBITS is the main infrastructure in the CSIC Marine Bioinformatics Service (CSIC’s catalog of service num. 825490).

Currently is used by more than 40 researchers from 8 countries, and it has been instrumental in more than 35 scientific publications, some of them with a high impact (Science, PNAS, Current Biology, Nature Communications, ISMEj) and more than 40 conference communications in national and international meetings.

MARBITS is also a valuable resource in the formation of new researchers, PhD and Masters students, with 15 finished PhD theses in the last 5 years and 13 more ongoing.