Pune: Two products that would handle large genomics data and biomolecular structural data securely have been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on Monday. Both were launched by the bioinformatics group during a three-day symposium in Accelerating Biology 2023: Discovery to Delivery.
Rajendra Joshi, senior director and head of the department of HPC Medical and Bioinformatics Applications in C-DAC, said, “The bioinformatics group in C-DAC has been focusing on cutting-edge research. It provides high-end solutions to various academia and industries using high-end supercomputing facilities to the researchers working in bioinformatics and also serves as a platform for a number of national and international collaborations.”
This data is also crucial for novel drug and vaccine development that leads to effective and precise public healthcare solutions. India needs to build a strong capability to develop such large facilities with modern hardware and software, which is capable of handling large genomics data, he said.
Integrated Computing Environment, one of the products introduced on Monday, is an indigenous cloud-based genomics computational facility for bioinformatics.
It integrates ICE-cube, a hardware infrastructure, and ICE flakes, a software component that will help store and analyze petascale to exascale of genomics data in a secure manner. ICE will help researchers to uncover the complete potential of the data to deliver India-specific products and solutions in healthcare, agriculture, livestock, and the environment.
The second product would enable biologists to visualize and analyze large volumes of biomolecular structural data resulting from experiments and simulations would surely accelerate the research in the field of computational drug discovery.
The use of high-performance computing to analyze this large time-scale relationship data through the rapid rendering of structures in 3D space would give the finest understanding of biology for new discoveries.