The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) launched its
Bioinformatics Applications and Resources Facility (BRAF) at C-DACs Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF), Knowledge Park, Bangalore on June 14, 2004. Shri. K. K. Jaswal, Secretary, Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India inaugurated the BRAF in the presence of senior officials from the DIT. Delivering the inaugural address, Shri. Jaswal stated that he would like to see the BRAF play the role of a Centre of Excellence to serve the academia and industry and take initiatives to build a consortium for Bioinformatics. He was of the view that it was very essential to build expert groups, which have excellent knowledge not just in life sciences, but also have equal skills in high performance computing. He also praised C-DAC's initiatives in setting up the BRAF and committed the DITs support to augment the facility in terms of any specific hardware, software or manpower. Moreover, Shri. Jaswal unveiled a plan to setup Bio-IT Parks under the STPI umbrella at various cities in India. The basic objective of the initiative would be to boost the bioinformatics and biotechnology industries in India and give them a jump-start by creating this facility.

Dr. A. K. Chakravarti, Advisor, DIT also addressed the audience outlining the BRAF initiative during the inaugural session. Earlier, Shri. S. Ramakrishnan, Executive Director, C-DAC delivered the introductory address, while Dr. S. C. Purohit, Director, C-DAC welcomed the dignitaries and the audience.

A Bioinformatics Discussion Meet followed the inaugural session. Eminent scientists in the Bioinformatics arena from academic organizations like IIT-Bombay, CDFD, Hyderabad, NCCS, Pune, NCL, Pune, JNU, Delhi, and NCBS, Bangalore and industries like Jubilant Biosys, Bangalore and SysArris Software Pvt., Bangalore participated in the Discussion Meet and delivered scientific/technical presentations in the high end computing areas of Bioinformatics. This was followed by demonstrations of the available bioinformatics software that have been ported on the PARAM Padma.

The event was specially targeted towards individuals with the need of High Performance Computing systems and grid computing to accelerate the process of research and derive solutions for the various biological problems that continue to baffle researchers today. Several people including researchers, policy and decision makers in Research Institutes, Universities, Bioinformatics Industries and the Government attended the inauguration and the Discussion Meet.

Many scientists believe that high-end computing is the future of biology and medicine. The bottleneck in this area has not been the collection of data, but the problem related to its analysis leading to knowledge discovery.

The BRAF provides a high-end supercomputing facility to the Bioinformatics research community with remote access to the existing Bioinformatics software available on PARAM Padma, the one teraflop supercomputer, developed indigenously by C-DAC. The facility would be a unique platform to biologists, biotechnologists, chemists and other academic and industry people, to accelerate their research in the areas of bioinformatics like molecular modeling, sequence analysis, comparative genomics, systems biology and microarray data analysis, chemoinformatics and so on.

For further information Click here to send an eMail