CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — An old two-story brick building in a shabby part of town, formerly a distribution center for Budweiser beer, is now the world’s most powerful factory for analyzing genes from people and viruses.

And it is a factory. At any given time, 10,000 tiny test tubes each holding a few drops of gene-containing fluid are being processed by six technicians, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — two on the night shift — using 50 dishwasher-sized machines in two large rooms.

The machines spit out sequence data onto a computer screen in the form of a long list, in order, of the letters that make up genetic material. That is three billion letters if the genes are from a person. Another 64 technicians do the more labor-intensive work of preparing the samples for analysis.

It is all in service of researchers who work for the Broad Institute, a gleaming, lavishly endowed genetics center a few blocks away. The sequencing center has worked on human DNA from an international effort, the 1,000 Genomes Project, that looks at the genes of thousands of people from around the world. It has gotten sequences of microbes, like dengue fever, malaria and West Nile virus. It has gotten genetic sequences from animals like chimpanzees.