Know Us | Background | Scientific Programme | Participants | Registration Fee
Venue | Bioinformatics@C-DAC

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Know Us

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with its genesis in the year 1988 as a national initiative of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MC&IT), Government of India embodies the true spirit of indigenous high-end research and development for state-of-the-art technologies and solutions. As a scientific society, C-DAC has been continuously engaged for over a decade and a half, towards the design, development and deployment of electronics and advanced Information Technology (IT) products and solutions for the benefit of the masses.

In an endeavor to facilitate the high quality research environment in C-DAC, the Scientific Engineering and Computing Group (SECG) is continually engaged in research and development of cutting edge applications on the PARAM series of supercomputers. C-DAC’s capabilities in this area today span a wide range of domains such as Bioinformatics, Computational Atmospheric Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Structural Mechanics, Evolutionary Computing, Seismic Data Processing and so on. The SECG is also collaborating with leading international and national research institutions to further the cause of scientific computing for the benefit of the research community.

Bioinformatics@C-DAC (http://bioinfo-portal.cdac.in)

Activities of Bioinformatics@C-DAC are aimed towards the comprehensive understanding of the various strata of biocomplexity and hence include an entire spectrum of data analyses. The major areas of focus are genome sequence assembly and annotation, gene finding, comparative genomics, microarray data analysis, reconstruction of metabolic pathways and molecular modelling.

The team has also developed GIPSY, a web based computing portal and Problem Solving Environment for widely used Bioinformatics applications on C-DAC's supercomputers. Under the “Bioinformatics Resources and Applications Facility” (BRAF) umbrella which is an effort towards providing high-end supercomputing resources, a 1Teraflop supercomputing facility dedicated for life science researchers will be inaugurated during the symposium.

The team is also poised to release the first Grid Computing efforts in the area of Bioinformatics in India. These initiatives enable researchers to pool the computing resources that are otherwise under-utilized and tackle problems in biology that have been hitherto unsolved.

The team collaborates with a number of eminent research organizations and industries such as the National Centre for Cell Science (Pune), University of Pune (Pune), Nicholas-Piramal (Mumbai), Ocimum Bio (Hyderabad), Jubilant BioSys Bangalore and Institute of Animal Health (UK).

Background

The “omics” revolution has changed the face of modern biology. Genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics & metabolomics, now occupy the center stage of biological research. These advances are mainly due to high level of automation of various laboratory techniques. High throughput techniques for genome sequencing, gene expression, protein profiling and gene & protein networks /interactions, are classic examples of how biology has changed from a cottage industry to a full-scale production science. Today, the challenges have shifted from issues of large-scale data generation to that of large-scale data analysis. It is the amount and type of biological data, about the cellular states and molecular structures that have driven the rapid advancement of bioinformatics.

Computing is seen to be biologists' most preferred tool and with each increment in the computing infrastructure, it is now possible to move up the biological complexity ladder. The storage, analysis and retrieval of the vast amount of such biological data is plausible through the use of powerful high performance computers that would carry out the task of analyzing this data. It is well known that many of the problems in bioinformatics can be addressed only with computing power, which is well beyond the teraflop scale. Here, Grid computing is poised to enable researchers to pool the computing resources at various places to accelerate the research. Using this kind of cutting edge technologies it is possible to unravel the grand challenges of science, which holds vast potential for improving human well being.

Scientific Programme

The technical sessions will comprise of invited talks from recognized professionals in the area of bioinformatics. The talks will address the challenges in the areas of genome analysis, comparative genomics, molecular modeling and algorithm development. On the occasion of the symposium it is planned to launch 1Teraflop computing facility dedicated for life science researchers in the country under BRAF. Participants would be provided logins for the supercomputing facility for a trial period. An application driven problem solving environment for parallel computing clusters viz GIPSY will also be released.

Symposium speakers

Participants

The symposium is targeted at students and researchers from academic institutes, universities and Bioinformatics industries.

Registration Fee

The registration fee includes symposium kit, tea/snacks and lunches. Accommodation will be made available to limited participants on request at an additional charge.

Last Date of Registration

All applicants should fill up the registration form and send it along with the applicable registration fees in the form of a demand draft at the address mentioned in the form not later than April 15, 2008. Registration is limited to a maximum of 50 participants, on a first come, first serve basis.

Registration Closed

Venue

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
Pune University Campus, Ganesh Khind Road,
Pune - 411 007,
India.
Tel: +91-20-2569 4084,
Fax: +91-20-2569 4004/81

Contact Info:

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
Bioinformatics Team
Convener : Dr. Rajendra Joshi
Kind Attn. : Ms. Sayali Gongle
Scientific and Engineering Computing Group
Pune University Campus,
Ganesh Khind,
Pune - 411 007,
India.

Tel: +91-20-2569 4084, Fax: +91-20-25694004/81
Email: Website: http://bioinfo-portal.cdac.in