C-DAC initiative to tackle future food crises in India

Sakal Times
February 12, 2011

PUNE: The Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), will be assisting the Indian Agricultural Statistical Research Institute (IASRI), in order to set-up a National Agricultural Bioinformatics Grid (NABG). The Grid would help enhance food availability, by decreasing crop seed testing time, enhancing food production quality and quantity.

“There are numerous problems that inadvertently require High Performance Computing (HPC) resources, without which our scientists will be handicapped in effectively meeting the farming community’s needs. We are positive that our HPC expertise will serve as an effective incubation tool, for the new age agri-food development in our country,” group co-ordinator & head of the HPC Solutions Group of C-DAC, Goldi Misra told Sakàl Times.

Our aim is to enable agriculture scientists to do high-end computing based research. For example, traditionally, the crop seed testing is done on the field. The field trials take almost six to nine months to give results. This grid, however, will enable researchers to make high-end simulations upon the computers.

“The time taken for showing results will be cut down to merely a few days. In some cases, just a few hours. Hence, better quality seeds can be tested faster, and introduced in the market quicker. Thus, the yield will be faster and better. Thus, problem of future food scarcity can be tackled well,” Misra said.