BOOTABLE: Bioinformatics benchmark tool suite for applications and hardware

The interest in analyzing biological data on a large scale has grown over the last years. Bioinformatics applications play an important role when it comes to the analysis of huge amounts of data. Due to the large amount of biological data and/or large problem spaces a considerable amount of computing resources is required to answer the raised research questions. In order to estimate which underlying hardware might be the most suitable for the bioinformatics tools applied, a well-defined benchmark suite is required. Such a benchmark suite can get useful in the case of purchasing hardware and even further for larger projects with the goal to establish a bioinformatics compute infrastructure. With this paper we present BOOTABLE, our bioinformatic benchmark suite. BOOTABLE currently contains seven popular and widely used bioinformatic applications representing a broad spectrum of usage characteristics. It further includes an automated installation procedure and all required datasets. Furthermore it includes functionalities to test any desired application with regards to resource consumption and scaling behavior.