Agricultural research at ILRI and its partners are aimed at producing healthier crops and livestock to alleviate poverty and hunger in the developing world through exploitation of the latest genome technologies. These technologies require state-of-the-art high-performance computing infrastructure. A high performance computing (HPC) platform was established at ILRI to serve the Bioinformatics computing needs of ILRI - and central and eastern Africa researchers under the Biosciences East and Central Africa (BecA/ILRI Hub) umbrella. By sharing the computational power of the HPC system, researchers will be able to conduct more extensive and large-scale genomic research quickly and cost-effectively.

The bioinformatics platform is a specialist node of The European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet). EMBnet is a consortium of collaborating bioinformatics groups located in Europe and a number of groups outside Europe. Each group is represented by a "node", and is responsible for the maintenance of local services for their users (e.g. education, training, software, database distribution, technical support, helpdesk).