Pune, October 30, 2003

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and IBM Life Sciences will be organizing a joint symposium on 'Computational Challenges in Bioinformatics' at C-DAC's Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF), Knowledge Park, Bangalore on November 5, 2003. The symposium aims at creating awareness about the High Performance Computing and Grid Computing applications in Bioinformatics, and provides a forum for researchers to exchange views on the subject. It also seeks to improve the understanding of related problems faced by the Bioinformatics industry and derive scientific solutions for them.

The technical session of the symposium will feature invited talks from internationally recognized professionals in the area of Genomics and Bioinformatics including Prof. A.S.Kolaskar (Vice-Chancellor, University of Pune), Prof. Sameer Brahmachari, (Director, IGIB, Delhi), Prof. Tim Littlejohn (IBM Life Sciences, Australia), Prof. A Bhattacharya (JNU, Delhi), Prof. Vijay Chandru (Chairman, Strand Genomics), Dr. Venkat (United Devices, USA) along with experts from C-DAC. The talks will cover the computational challenges in the areas of sequence analysis, comparative genomics, molecular modeling and algorithm development. The symposium will also feature a panel discussion on the requirements and usage of HPC facilities for Bioinformatics in India, followed by demonstrations of the Bioinformatics software that have been developed and ported on the PARAM Padma, India's fastest supercomputer housed at CTSF, Bangalore.

Computing has been predicted to be the biologist's number one tool in the future and 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. Carrying out research in areas like genome sequence analysis, molecular modeling, comparative genomics, microarray data analysis and systems biology require high-end computation, as enormous amount of data need to be analyzed. Modeling multiple levels of biological complexity is well beyond the next generation of supercomputers, but each increment in the computing infrastructure makes it possible to move up the biological complexity ladder and tackle problems that would hitherto remain unsolved. Grid computing as a tool for Bioinformatics is touted to be the answer to the problems faced by biologists, which go beyond the teraflop range. Life Sciences is a key area in which research will be accelerated through grid computing. A collaborative research of distributed scientists will assist in solving the mysteries of life, in the treatment of diseases, in developing better crops leading to an overall healthy being.

The symposium expects to attract researchers, policy and decision makers in Research Institutes, Universities, Bioinformatics Industries and the Government. The event is targeted especially to benefit those who have felt 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.

Established in March 1988, as a Scientific Society of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (formerly the Department of Electronics), Government of India, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), is primarily an R&D institution involved in the design, development and deployment of electronics and advanced Information Technology (IT) products and solutions.

In a decade and a half since its inception, C-DAC has established its brand image as a premier R & D institution of national and international repute working in advanced areas of electronics and information technology and developing and deploying IT products and solutions for diverse sectors of economy. C-DAC's foray in the area of Supercomputing based Bioinformatics has a manifesto to develop, port and optimize codes on the PARAM series of Supercomputers, in the various areas of Bioinformatics like molecular modeling, sequence analysis, comparative genomics and microarray data analysis, and to carry out research in the related areas.

IBM Life Sciences is dedicated to rapidly bringing leading-edge technology out of the laboratory into the marketplace for customers and business partners in the fields of pharmaceutical research, biotechnology, genomics, proteomics, healthcare and academic research. Combined with IBM's core strength in providing robust technology and global services, the IBM Life Sciences Business Unit delivers innovative, scalable infrastructure solutions that are unique to the life sciences industry.

C-DAC has been interacting with IBM Life Sciences for quite some time and is also a business partner on various collaborative R&D projects.

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