Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, also known as SCFBio IIT Delhi, is a center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology in Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. This facility was established in 2002 under the aegis of Department of Chemistry, IIT Delhi. It is recognized as a center of excellence in Bioinformatics by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India.
जैवसूचना विज्ञान एवं अभिकलनी जीवविज्ञान हेतु अतिअभिकलन सुविधा, भारतीय प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान नई दिल्ली | |
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| Type | Public Research |
|---|---|
| Established | 31 July 2002 |
| Co-ordinator | Prof. B. Jayaram |
| Location | , |
| Campus | Urban |
| Affiliations | Indian Institute of Technology Delhi |
| Website | SCFBio |
History
The Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics and computational biology (SCFBio), IIT Delhi, was established in July 2002 with funding from Department of Biotechnology under the guidance of Prof. B. Jayaram. It aims at developing novel scientific methods and new software for genome analysis, protein structure prediction and in silico drug design. The facility was inaugurated by Honorable Minister of Science and Technology and Human Resource Development Shri Murli Manohar Joshi, IITD adopted SCFBio as a Central Facility of National importance in March 2003.
SCFBio was upgraded to a multi-teraFLOP facility under the Programme support from DBT and inaugurated on September, 2009 by honorable secretary DBT, Dr M K Bhan. The aggregate compute power of the facility is over 6 teraFLOPS with a data storage of over 50 Terabytes and a modern datacenter. The facility is connected via 10MbPS dedicated line. Recently, these are augmented by 10 teraFLOPS of GPU based cluster along with 150 terabytes of parallel file system storage.
Vision
"Genome to Drug" (Dhanvantari) envisages delivering drug molecules to society from genomic/proteomic information. It consists of mainly three stages:
- interpreting the language of genomic DNA and identifying a druggable protein coding gene (Chemgenome) for diseases/disorders,
- determining the three dimensional structure of the protein target ( Bhageerath-H) and
- creating small molecules (drug) that can bind with high affinity and specificity to the protein/DNA target but with least toxicity to humans (Sanjeevini).
To develop novel scientific methods and highly efficient algorithms, combining principles of Chemistry and Biology with Information Technology for Genome analysis, Protein structure prediction and target directed Drug Design pursuing the dream of delivering GENOME to DRUG to the society.
Human resource training
Eighteen PhD students have completed their PhD. Currently nine students are pursuing PhD in areas of genomics, proteomics and drug design. Over 600 participants have been trained in various aspects of bioinformatics through short-term training programs. SCFBio organized several workshops and international conferences including InCoB 2006.
Two start-up companies have evolved (Leadinvent and novoinformatics) so far from SCFBio. It has also fruitful collaboration with Dabur, HCl Life Sciences and NIIT. It forms the computational backbone to School of Biological Sciences, IIT Delhi creating a strong collaboration between computational and experimental biology.