Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed a new super computer called 'Biochrome' to help computational biological research. It is developed by the Bioinformatics Resources and Applications Facility (BRAF) at C-DAC with the investment of Rs 1 crore.
Biochrome is providing high-end supercomputing facility to the researchers working in the areas of life sciences.
Commenting on this, Rajendra Joshi, associate director and head of the bio informatics group, C-DAC, said, "Biochrome cluster can be accessed by researchers from industry and academia for research work. Such a dedicated high performance computing facility is one of the technology enablers, which can accelerate the process of analyzing or data mining and simulation of biological data. This tsunami of data has led to a sea change in the storage and computing requirements. Many biologists are adopting the use of cyber infrastructure."
He added, "The last few decades have witnessed the evolution of biology from what used to be a purely experimental field, to a high end computational domain, where unrelenting computational power is required to decipher pieces of data generated through high throughput techniques into blocks of information that will help to answer many mysteries of life. To be able to generate knowledge from the oceans of genomic data, enabling technologies like high performance computing, grid computing and cloud computing are the latest weapons in the hands of the modern biologist."
The Biochrome cluster is an advanced blade server-based high performance computing (HPC) facility. The cluster has a peak computing capacity of 5 TeraFlop with 504 computing cores using 6 core Intel Xeon 2.67 GHz processor.
Cyber infrastructure is a combination of data resources, high-speed networks and high performance computing resources that bring people, information and computational resources together to perform science in this information driven world. BRAF is one such effort towards building an advanced cyber infrastructure for life science research.
BRAF is also setting up an advanced cyber infrastructure for life sciences in collaborating with National Cancer Institute (NCI) of National Institutes of Health (NIH) (USA), Tata Memorial Centre, (Mumbai), Roslin Institute (UK), University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Surrey (UK), Oregon Health and Science University (USA), Sanger Institute (UK), National Centre for Cell Science (Pune), University of Pune (Pune), IIT Madras (Chennai) and National Chemical Laboratory (Pune).
