C-DAC makes new supercomputer, Biochrome, to aid biology research

The Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), maker of series of high-end PARAM supercomputer, has developed a new powerful supercomputer called Biochrome to aid computational biology research with an investment of Rs 1 crore, a top official said.

“The Biochrome machine is an advanced blade server based high performance computing (HPC) facility developed by our scientists to aid biology researchers in the country and abroad,” Professor Rajat Moona, director general of C-DAC, said. The machine has a peak computing capacity of 5 TeraFlop or the capacity to perform 5 trillion operations per second.

“About 10 scientists from C-DAC spent over six months to design and produce Biochrome machine with a total investment of Rs 1 crore funded by the Department of Information Technology, government of India,” Rajendra Joshi, associate director and head of the department of Bioinformatics, C-DAC, who headed the research team, said. He said Biochrome is the latest product from Bioinformatics Resources and Applications Facility (BRAF) at C-DAC, to be used for high-end computation for bioinformatics. “Biochrome cluster can be accessed by researchers from industry and academia for research work,” Joshi said.

He said BRAF is an effort towards providing high-end supercomputing facility to the researchers working in the areas of life sciences. He said next generation sequencing technology had brought in a new dimension to understand the molecular basis for the occurrence of diseases.

“The next generation sequencing technology enables sequencing of hundreds of genomes at an extremely rapid rate and at a significantly lower cost,” Joshi said. To be able to generate knowledge from the oceans of genomic data, enabling technologies like high performance computing, grid computing and cloud computing were the latest weapons in the hands of modern biologist, he said.

Joshi said BRAF was also setting up an advanced Cyberinfrastructure for life sciences in collaboration with National Cancer Institute of National Institute of Health, USA, Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai, Roslin Institute, UK, University of Edinburgh, UK, University of Surrey, UK, Oregon Health and Science University, USA, National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, IIT, Chennai and National Chemical Laboratory, Pune.

Cutting edge HPC applications for bioinformatics

Canadian-based GPU maker Tycrid Platform Technologies has just announced the launch of the Prometheus Alliance, a collaborative effort aimed at developing cutting edge HPC applications for bioinformatics, with a specific emphasis on next-gen sequencing data and personalized genomics.

Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies, stated in a release that "Alliance is being established to address a specific challenge that continues to impede the progress of scientific discovery – the lack of scalable, purpose-built appliances. I feel this is critical as we can virtually eliminate the need for scientists to become computer scientists. Our goal is to take a fresh, innovative approach to developing HPC solutions that do one thing really well – address specific computational challenges for bioinformatics.”

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