Mumbai, India (CU)_ India’s National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI) in Chandigarh has launched a new supercomputing center. The new state-of-the-art 650 teraflops supercomputing center was opened last week by Dr. Jitendra Singh, Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Science and Technology, and Earth Sciences.
During the inauguration, Singh discussed the advanced services that will be offered by the facility. He said, “This will cater to the needs of interdisciplinary cutting-edge research being carried out in the institute related to agriculture and nutritional biotechnology. It will also be available for scientists of NABI and Centre of Innovation and Applied Bioprocessing and will be open to collaborative work for the scientists and faculties working in neighboring institutes and universities”.
NABI did not disclose the hardware details of the new system; however, stated that it included one Master Node, 28 Compute Nodes, one Fat Node, two GPU Nodes, and a single Storage Node. The data from large-scale genomes studies, functional genomics studies, and structural genomics studies will be analyzed in the center. The facility, which is one of the initiatives of India’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), was financed by the Department of Science and Technology at a cost of INR 20 crore ($2.7 million).
According to Prof. Ashwani Pareek, Executive Director of NABI and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing (CIAB), the center’s advanced supercomputing services will be accessible to the NABI and CIAB researchers and the neighboring institutes or universities and for certain NSM-funded projects. NABI was founded in 2010 with the mission of providing sustainable and innovative solutions for food and nutrition quality in India via agri-food biotechnology research.
Ashwani Pareek discussed the importance of the facility. He said, “This high-end facility will be a boon for the analysis of big data accruing from the large-scale genomics, functional genomics, structural genomics, and population studies being carried out at various Institutes and universities of national and international repute”.
