About

BioNeMo Inference Runtime (BioIR) is NVIDIA's library for structure-prediction inference. A five-stage GPU pipeline turns AlphaFold-lineage and all-atom models into PDB/mmCIF with confidence scores. Models stay ordinary nn.Modules — no TensorRT engine build.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Linux, x86_64 or aarch64, with an NVIDIA GPU.
• Driver 580 or newer. The dev image carries a CUDA 13.2 build of PyTorch. An older driver runs it only through the forward-compatibility shim, which we have measured hanging and crashing part-way through a run rather than merely running slowly — results taken on one are discarded, not corrected.
• Python 3.12. The released wheels are tagged cp312, so pip finds no matching build on a newer interpreter.
• gh logged in with read access to NVIDIA-BioNeMo/BioNeMo-Inference-Runtime, to download the release wheel.
• Docker and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit, to build from source in the dev container. Installing the wheel needs neither.

PyTorch and the CUDA math libraries arrive as wheel dependencies, or in nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:26.05-py3 when you use the container. Building the extension from source outside a container needs a C++17 compiler and CUDA headers as well — docs/dev.md.

Release-qualified GPUs

H200, H100, A100, L40S, GB200 and GB300. Measured speedup, memory and accuracy for each: docs/ref/benchmark.md.

BioIR runs on more than these. The support matrix lists every architecture the backend covers and which fused kernels apply to each; those devices work but are not part of this release's qualification.

Install

The wheels are attached to each GitHub release, one per base image and CPU architecture. Download the one matching yours, check it against SHA256SUMS, then rename it before installing:

gh release download 0.1.0rc1 \
  --repo NVIDIA-BioNeMo/BioNeMo-Inference-Runtime \
  --pattern '*26.05-py3_amd64_*.whl' --pattern SHA256SUMS
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

for f in *_amd64_bionemo_ir-*.whl; do
  n=${f#*_amd64_}                  # drop the pytorch-<base>_<arch>_ prefix
  mv "$f" "${n/.cu132./+cu132.}"   # restore the "+" GitHub rewrote to "."
done

pip install ./bionemo_ir-*.whl

On aarch64, match '*26.05-py3_arm64_*.whl' and *_arm64_* instead.

Both renames are required, and neither is cosmetic. The asset name carries a pytorch-<base>_<arch>_ prefix naming the build it came from, and GitHub rewrites + to . in asset names — so pip cannot parse the file as a wheel at all and rejects it with Invalid wheel filename. Check the download before renaming: SHA256SUMS lists the original names.

The wheel ships the kernels precompiled, so nothing in the install builds CUDA and running it needs only the driver's libcuda.so.1. That is the whole install if you are calling BioIR from your own code — the container below is for working on BioIR itself.

Build from source

Configure SSH authentication with GitHub, then clone the repository and fetch its submodules and LFS objects.

git lfs install &&
  GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=0 \
    git clone --recurse-submodules \
      git@github.com:NVIDIA-BioNeMo/BioNeMo-Inference-Runtime.git &&
  cd BioNeMo-Inference-Runtime

Then, build the dev image and open a shell in it:

docker/dev.sh

The image carries the dependencies; your checkout is bind-mounted, so install the package once inside and fold something:

pip install -e '.[dev]'
scripts/fetch_weights.sh --model boltz-2
python examples/folding/run_demo.py --output-dir output

Checkpoints come from their upstream publishers and need no NVIDIA credentials; anything that cannot be fetched is skipped, and the tests needing it skip too. Running scripts/run_tests.sh stages weights and runs the suite the way CI does.

Building without a container needs more than a Python environment — see docs/dev.md for the prerequisites and the wheel build. The rest of that page covers daily development; docs/ref/docker-images.md covers the images and what docker/dev.sh mounts.

Documentation

BioIR documentation lives under docs/ and is published with Fern:

• Overview — what BioIR is and how to start
• Installation — requirements and release-wheel installation
• Quickstart — run a serial Boltz-2 prediction
• Ray multi-GPU inference — scale independent requests across visible GPUs
• Developer guide — build, test, stage weights, contribute
• API reference — build_processor, model constructors, inputs/outputs
• Architecture — five-stage pipeline and runtime design
• Config architecture — model BaseConfig tree and pipeline stage configs
• Support matrix — models, GPUs, and fused kernels
• Benchmarks — measured speedup and memory against OSS PyTorch
• Model weights — checkpoint resolution and staging
• Docker images — development and runtime images
• Coding guidelines — style, naming, and tooling
• Folding example — runnable build_processor demo

Benchmarks

Methodology

Folding benchmarks over a bench set the shipped rebuild_dataset.py builds from RCSB and NVIDIA's MSA Search NIM — there is no dataset release to download. Template-bearing samples included: both sides load every bundled MSA and attach every listed template.

• One GPU, serial, one structure per forward call.
• Time only GPU-synchronized model.forward(). Featurization, transfers, postprocessing, writing, and scoring stay outside the window.
• Discard one warmup forward, then report one measured forward per sample.
• BioIR runs its default optimized config, with a CUDA graph on the diffusion module where supported.
• OSS runs its own inference script: eager always, plus torch.compile when it passes a dynamic-shape probe.
• Runtime knobs match on both sides — 200 sampling steps, 3 or 5 diffusion samples, and per-model recycling.
• Score written structures with OpenStructure lDDT and DockQ. Speedup is OSS forward / BioIR forward; above 1 favors BioIR.
• Future work will add additional Blackwell-optimized kernels.

Results

Geomean speedup, vs OSS torch.compile / vs OSS PyTorch eager; above 1 favours BioIR. Protenix has no torch.compile path. Eleven GPUs, per-model accuracy and peak memory, and how to reproduce any of it: docs/ref/benchmark.md.

The bench-perf-oss agent skill has the full gates, environment isolation, result schema, and charting protocol.

Contributing

We welcome contributions. See contributing.md for policy and docs/dev.md for the development workflow.

Citation

If you use BioIR in your research, please cite it via CITATION.cff.

Contact / Support

• Bugs and feature requests: GitHub Issues
• Usage questions: GitHub Discussions
• Security vulnerabilities: see SECURITY.md — do not file a public issue

License

NVIDIA-authored BioIR code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Distribution compliance material is available here:

• Third-party notices and attributions
• Full third-party license texts
• Gemmi 0.6.5 corresponding source, licensed under MPL-2.0 or LGPL-3.0-or-later; BioIR distributes it under the MPL-2.0 option