C-DAC signs MoU with NABI for cooperation in Agri Food Sector

Pune
February 04, 2011

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, a national initiative of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India signed an MoU with the National Agri - Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI), Mohali, an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India that aims at catalyzing the transformation of the agri - food sector in India.

Leveraging on the expertise of both the sides, the MoU envisages initiating and promoting High Performance Computing research in the Agri-Food Biotechnology domain.

Speaking on the occasion, Executive Director, NABI, Mohali, Dr Rakesh Tuli said, “This MoU between NABI, Mohali and C-DAC, Pune will foster development of state-of-art bioinformatics research facility (High Performance Computing Cluster) at NABI for genome, transcriptome and epigenome analysis for food and fruit crop improvement. It will be mainly used for implementing genome-wide association study to find important genes, regulatory elements involved in traits of processing quality and nutrition content in important food and fruit crops. We look forward to setting up Bioinformatics HPC facility at NABI with help of HPC Solutions Group at C-DAC, Pune”.

Addressing the media, Dr Hemant Darbari, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune commented that the potential of HPC “to accelerate research is a technological boost to the scientific community, and the agri-food sector will benefit largely from it. Already, HPC has become a norm in the bioinformatics sector for drug discovery and disease prediction. Similarly, it will not be long when our scientists from the agri-food sector shall answer to the challenges of better crop production, disease resilient crops and crops with higher nutritional value. This will surely open the doors to the new agricultural revolution in the country and also solve the problems associated with food scarcity and malnutrition. We are equally proud to be associated with NABI to share our HPC capabilities and assist their scientists in their domain of research”.

Speaking on the new tie-up, Senior Director, C-DAC, Pune, Dr Pradeep K Sinha said, “It would be the endeavor of C-DAC to impart technological knowledge using the available HPC expertise of C-DAC so that we can contribute substantially to nation-building”.

Mr Goldi Misra, Group Coordinator and Head, HPC Solutions Group, C-DAC, Pune said, “We look forward to nurturing and establishing a new relationship with NABI, thus ensuring, leap-frogging together with innovative and original technologies benefiting directly to large-scale end-users, providing the multiple benefits to the society in Agri-Food Biotechnology domain.”

Dr Shrikant Mantri, Senior Scientist, NABI, Mohali and Shri Abhishek Das, Scientist and Team Leader, HPC Solutions Group, C-DAC, Pune were also present at the occasion.

For more details, please contact:

Mr Goldi Misra,
Group Coordinator and Head,
HPC Solutions Group,
C-DAC, Pune
E-Mail: goldi@cdac.in