Bioinformatics centre to come up at CDPD

The CoE will come up at the newly built premises of CDFD at Gandipet near here today. The MoU was signed by Seyed Hasnain, the director of CDFD, BP Acharya, the secretary, industries & commerce, government of Andhra Pradesh, and Andrew Lim, Sun Microsystems director (global education & research) for Asia South, in the presence of Kim Jones, the vice-president (global education & research) of Sun Microsystems.

Hasnain told a gathering of scientists from CDFD and officials from the government and Sun Microsystems that the CoE was the first of its kind in the country.

CDFD had been selected by Sun Microsystems and the state government for its pioneering work in the areas of DNA fingerprinting, diagnostics and bioinformatics.

Hasnain said that a number of research projects were being pursued, which would focus on molecular aspects of diseases like glucomas, cancer as well as infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS.

The presence of the-state-of-the-art computing architecture, being provided by Sun Microsystems, and an optimised software, enabled by collaboration with TCS, would help the premier research centre cater to the needs of regional biological community in a user-friendly manner.

The CoE would also function as the national node of the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) to promote bioinformatics education in the state. On the contribution of CDFD to the society, Hasnain said the research institution had successfully come out with research outputs of eminent standing.

Co-development of new hybrid varieties of silk worms, development of novel diagnostics approaches for certain eye disorders, developing a new software suite for genome analysis were some of the major achievements of CDFD.

It is the regional node for the department of biotechnology's India Bio-Grid. CDFD is also becoming the only national node of the European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet) outside Europe, Hasnain added.

Acharya traced the genesis of Sun Microsystems' alliance formed with the state government two years ago, as part of the state's efforts to create an exclusive zone for biotech companies, Genome Valley.

He said that of the Rs 30-crore outlay for the CoE, Sun Microsystems would provide state-of-the-art computing hardware at a cost of Rs 20 crore, while the CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) and the Andhra Pradesh government would contribute the remaining funds.

Kim Jones said CoE was the third such centre set up by Sun Microsystems in Asia, the other two being in Singapore and Beijing. She said Sun's CoE at CDFD would promote open standards and collaborate and network with the biological community networks and other Sun CoEs abroad.

Jones said that Sun would strive to promote CDFD among the bioinformatics community worldwide. She said that the Sun hardware on the CDFD campus would include a large Sun Fire 12,000 enterprise server with 10 terabytes of storage housed in Sun StorEdge 6,320 arrays for the data warehouse; a Sun Fire V440 as a technical compute portal and a Sun Fire V240R as messaging and application servers; a Linux-based Grid Farm with 32 processors and other servers for high-performance bioinformatics computing; Sun Blade 1,500 graphical desktops; Sun Blade 150 desktops and Sun Ray appliances.