simNGS is software for simulating observations from Illumina sequencing machines using the statistical models behind the AYB base-calling software. By default, observations only incorporate noise due to sequencing and do not incorporate effects from more esoteric sources of noise that may be present in real data ("dust", bubbles, merged clusters, sequence-heterogeneous clusters, etc). Many of these additional sources may optionally applied.
simNGS takes fasta format sequences and a file describing the covariance of noise between bases and cycles observed in an actual run of the machine, randomly generates noisy intensities representing the signals for the sequence at each cycle and calculates likelihoods for all possible base calls.
