Behind TheBioHub Labs

Why this exists

The Bioinformatics Hub at the University of Calgary maintains its own research-facing web infrastructure — TheBioHub.ca, the Microbial Clinical Atlas, this site, and every lab homepage we hand-build.

All of it runs on Amazon Web Services in Canada (ca-west-1), independently provisioned and maintained since May 1st, 2026. This is a permanent setup: we manage the servers, domains and certificates ourselves, so the sites our collaborators rely on stay online and up to date.

Running our own infrastructure means we carry the cost — EC2 instances, S3 storage, domain registrations, TLS certificates, and the engineering time to keep everything running. Lab Branding is one of the ways we fund that work: every lab we host helps offset the cost of running infrastructure for the rest of the Bioinformatics Hub's research outputs. Should you wish to support this work in any form — through a discretionary contribution, a memorial fund, or by simply commissioning a lab homepage — we would be honoured to hear from you, and grateful for your consideration.

What we offer

Lab Branding is our first experiment — a hand-built homepage service for academic labs at the University of Calgary. A complete visual identity, an academic-grade homepage, hosting with disaster-recovery backups, and hassle-free maintenance. See the full pitch →

ARCade is our second experiment — run curated bioinformatics pipelines on ARC by chatting in plain English with an AI model that runs on ARC itself. No job scripts, no cloud AI service, and your data never leaves the cluster. See the details →

Acknowledgement

The Bioinformatics Hub is supported by the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases at the University of Calgary. The Snyder Institute has long recognized the growing importance of computational biology, data science, and bioinformatics in advancing biomedical research.

Under the leadership of Dr Braedon McDonald, the Bioinformatics Hub was established to help meet this need by supporting researchers, clinicians, trainees, and collaborators with bioinformatics expertise, data analysis, scientific software development, and translational research infrastructure. Through this work, the Hub aims to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and help turn complex biological and clinical data into meaningful scientific insight. Ultimately, the Hub contributes to translational research that bridges discovery and clinical application — advancing our understanding of chronic disease and supporting better outcomes for patients.