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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
INDIA PLANS GRID FACILITIES FOR
BIO-INFORMATICS
The department of information technology (DIT) sees "bio-informatics as the
next layer of the IT-enabled revolution" in India and plans to build
supercomputing facilities with a world-class network infrastructure for the
bio-informatics industry.
According to its annual plan requirements for 2004-05 submitted to the
Planning Commission recently, DIT has stated that the government needs to
invest for positioning India as the preferred bio-informatics destination in
the world.
"DIT intends to provide the necessary super computing facility and a 10
teraflop I-Grid for bio-informatics industry and also help them with access to
databases relevant to post-genomic research. We see in bio-informatics, the
next layer of IT-enabled revolution," DIT told the Planning Commission in the
plan paper.
I-Grid is an international Grid computing infrastructure dedicated to
research
work. Grid computing helps in using network capacity at its optimum level by
using free capacities (bandwidth pipes) and decongesting overloaded pipes on
the network. A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be
expressed as a trillion floating point operations per second. Floating-point
is a method of encoding real numbers within the limits available on
computers.
The project, according to DIT sources, will not only benefit the
bio-informatics industry, but will also support other research driven sectors.
The project will be implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC) within a five-year timeframe starting from 2004.
Though DIT has not specified its fund requirement for the project in its
plan
paper, the total budget requirement from the government for C-DAC alone has
been pegged at Rs 46.5 crore in the financial year 2004-05 as compared to Rs
25 crore in 2003-04.
As reported by eFE last week, the department has demanded a huge budget of
Rs
736 crore only for infrastructure development projects in 2004-05. However,
DIR received only Rs 129 crore for infrastructure projects in 2003-04. DIT has
almost tripled its gross budget support for the next fiscal and demanded a
budget support of Rs 1,294 crore for 2004-05 as against Rs 470 crore in the
current fiscal.
DIT has proposed a pilot project to set up a high capacity backbone network
with broadband connectivity so that last mile fibre can be optimally used to
increase Internet penetration. The pilot is proposed to be implemented between
two cities at an estimated cost of Rs 4 crore.
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