Bioinformatics wing at C-DAC Upgraded

Express News Sevice
February 18, 2014

THE Bioinformatics Resources and Application Facility(BRAF) located at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC) has been upgraded in the form of new supercomputing cluster upon completing 10 years.

The cluster named Param Bioblaze is expected to evolve into a leadership centre for computational biology, giving a technological edge to the India in the filed of computational biology. Inaugurated in 2004, the BRAF facility at C-DAC after upgradation has a processing speed more than 200 times than before as well as enhanced storage capacity.

"After serving the bioinformatics community for more than 10 years, it is on that BRAF facility would grow further to evolve into a leadership centre for computational biology. The upgraded facility would enable researchers to take up grand challenge problems in the near future. This is of strategic importance for the development of science and technology in the country," Rajendra Joshi associate director and head of the department of Bioinformatics Group at C-DAC told media persons on Monday.

He added. "New advances in biology are being made at a rapidly increasing pace, largely due new technologies and large amount of automation. The pace of genome sequencing is leading to data overload and therefore the ability to analyse it is much beyond the existing computing capabilities. This tsunami of data has led to a sea change in storage and computing requirements. In order to gear up to tackle these challenges. most biologists are adopting the use of cyber infrastructure, which is a combination of data resources. high-speed networks and high-performance computing resources. Upgraded BRAF is such effort towards one building a cyber infrastructure."

Conference on Accelerating Biology

C-DAC will organise a three-day symposium, Accelerating Biology 2014: Computing Life, Tuesday The objective of the symposium is the decade celebration of BRAF and the launch of the Param Bioblaze, said Hemant Darbari, executive director C-DAC Pune.