Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

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 ...

Through a complex analysis of protein interactions, researchers from IRB Barcelona and the Joint Programme IRB-BSC have discovered new molecular mechanisms that may be involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The study, a collaboration between bioinformaticians and cell biologists, was led by IRB Barcelona group leader and ICREA researcher Patrick Aloy and appears today in the Genome Research, a reference journal in the field of genomics. Alzheimer’s disease is an age-related neurodegenerative disease. Despite the considerable efforts made in recent years to understand the mechanisms that trigger this disease, an effective treatment is not yet available. This study reveals new molecular and functional data that could help researchers gain a better understanding of the disease and potentially to develop new therapies.  From the computer to the lab  Proteins are the molecular instruments that cells use to carry out their functions. Proteins don’t normally act alone,...

Fastest supercomputer in the world proves one in a million billion Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed. Built from microchips originally destined for games consoles, Roadrunner is the world's latest supercomputer. Yesterday it was officially crowned the fastest computer around, having performed a record million billion calculations per second. As an indication of how fast this is, manufacturers explained that if 6 billion people were to do one sum a second on calculator, it would take 46 years to do what RoadRunner could do in a day. The world's first supercomputer, the Cray 1 built in the mid-1970s, would take 1,500 years to finish a calculation that Roadrunner would perform in two hours. For six months, the computer will direct its formidable processing power at scientific problems. It will analyse how HIV vaccines should best be administered, ...