The Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting (CDFD), the AP government and Sun Micro Systems have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for setting up a Rs.30 crore centre of excellence (CoE) in bioinformatics in Hyderabad. The project is to be located at CDFD’s new facility at Gandipet near Hyderabad and will focus on medical bioinformatics. The facility is expected to start its operations by the end of this year.

The MoU was signed by CDFD director Seyed Hasnain, BP Acharya, the secretary, Industries & Commerce, government of Andhra Pradesh, and Andrew Lim, Sun Microsystems director (global education & research) for Asia South on Wednesday.

Hasnain said that CDFD had been selected by Sun Microsystems and the state government for its pioneering work in the areas of DNA fingerprinting, diagnostics and bioinformatics. The presence of the-state-of-the-art computing architecture, being provided by Sun Microsystems, and the software provided by TCS, would help the premier research centre, cater to the needs of the regional biological community in a user-friendly manner.

The CoE would also function as the national node of the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) to promote bioinformatics education in the state. It is the regional node for the department of biotechnology's India Bio-Grid. CDFD is also becoming the only national node of the European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet) outside Europe, Hasnain added.

Hasnain said that a number of research projects were being pursued, which would focus on molecular aspects of diseases like glaucomas, cancer as well as infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS. Co-development of new hybrid varieties of silk worms, development of novel diagnostics approaches for certain eye disorders, developing a new software for genome analysis were some of the major achievements of CDFD.

Acharya said that of the Rs.30-crore outlay for the CoE, Sun Microsystems would provide state-of-the-art computing hardware at a cost of Rs.20 crore, while the CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) and the Andhra Pradesh government would contribute the remaining funds.

Kim Jones said CoE was the third such centre set up by Sun Microsystems in Asia, the other two being in Singapore and Beijing. Sun's CoE at CDFD would promote open standards and collaborate and network with the biological community networks and other Sun CoEs abroad. Sun would strive to promote CDFD among the bioinformatics community worldwide. She said that the Sun hardware on the CDFD campus would include a large Sun Fire 12,000 enterprise server with 10 terabytes of storage housed in Sun StorEdge 6,320 arrays for the data warehouse; a Sun Fire V440 as a technical compute portal and a Sun Fire V240R as messaging and application servers; a Linux-based Grid Farm with 32 processors and other servers for high-performance bioinformatics computing; Sun Blade 1,500 graphical desktops; Sun Blade 150 desktops and Sun Ray appliances.