Professor Bellgard says that there have been marked improvements in productivity thanks to Yabi. "We are able to use the Yabi environment to make available tools in a very accessible way for life science researchers."

The team has made resources available for other research communities, for example scientists studying cattle tick genome. "We've created a bioinformatics resource which behind the scenes uses the Yabi environment," Professor Bellgard says.

Although Yabi comes out of a life science environment, the tool can be used across scientific disciplines. One of its strengths, according to Professor Bellgard, is its flexibility.

"Pretty much any tool that can be run on a command line can actually be incorporated into the Yabi environment. So any command line tool whether it's a statistical tool, whether it's a genomics or a bioinformatics tool, whether it be a remote sensing tool, whether it be an astronomy tool can be incorporated."

And although its focus is on HPC, Yabi utilises standard tools and protocols so it can be deployed in non-supercomputing environments. The developers are now targeting the cloud; "we are getting Yabi ready for a cloud based deployment which demonstrates that it is a very scalable system," Professor Bellgard says.