*Hardware architecture: At the core of HIVE there exists a solid backbone hardware made of few redundant critical components and scalable compute and storage units. The diagram at the right demonstrates the connectivity and components assignations for such HIVE cluster. Core components providing the vital functions for HIVE cloud include 
**web servers facing outside through the high-end secure firewall to support web-portal functionality; 
**cloud servers are the core functional units orchestrating distributed storage and computations workflows through complex queuing and prioritization schemas; 
**high availability drone hardware serves as a computational unit for scientific visualization and user interface support functionalities; 
**ultra-fast inter-process communication storage units organize distributed computations data interchange staging arena. 
**switches and firewall hardware organize the secure high performance network environment for HIVE cloud.
**permanent storage units each are designed to store hundreds of terabytes of NGS data and reference genomes as well as storage for computational results and personal user files. 
Sub-clusters of scalable high performance high density compute cores are there to serve as a powerhouse for extra-large distributed parallelized computations of NGS algorithmics. System is extremely scalable and has deployment instances ranging from a single HIVE in a box appliance to massive enterprise level systems of thousands of compute units.
*Software architecture: HIVE software infrastructure consists of layers incrementally providing more functionality. 
**The Kernel backbone layer provides integration with heterogeneous hardware and operating system platforms.
**HIVE cloud backbone supports distributed storage, security and computing environment.
**Science backbone represents set of low level scientific libraries to perform variety of scientific computations, mathematical apparatus for chemical, biological, statistical and other purely scientific concepts
**CGI and Java-script layers provide web-portal and web-application compatibility layers.
**Low level libraries provide Application Programming Interface (API) for developing tools and utilities.
**Integrated apps provide major NGS tool arsenal 
**Web-apps and HIVE –portal provide web-portal functionality