GAMING

The supercomputing facility of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and IT major NIIT Ltd have joined hands to launch a six month training programme in bioinformatics and computational biology field. The cutting-edge curriculum to be offered, under the aegis of Foundation of Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) at IIT Delhi, will commence from June this year and will initially comprise of 25 students in the first batch. The fee structure for the programme is Rs 60,000 and on successful completion of the course, candidates will be issued the certificate jointly by NIIT, supercomputing facility and FITT, IIT Delhi. Announcing this, NIIT chairman RS Pawar said, “Bioinformatics is an emerging interdisciplinary area of science and technology encompassing a systematic development and application of IT solutions to biological data. The highly interdisciplinary nature of bioinformatics calls for specialised training programmes.” Giving the programme details, he said the programme on bioinformatics and computational biology includes thorough training in fundamentals of modern biology, IT and hands on training in bioinformatics on the supercomputer at IIT Delhi. While the bioinformatics modules would be offered at IIT, the IT modules would be delivered at NIIT’s training centre in New Delhi. The supercomputing facility at IIT Delhi for bioinformatics and computational biology, focuses on advances in genomics, proteomics and drug design through research and training programmes. It currently hosts an aggregate compute power of 150 billion operations per second and can store data up to 1.5 terabytes. IDC has estimated that IT spending on bio-sciences will cross $138 million in India by 2005. The worldwide spend on use of IT in bioinformatics is also likely to spiral upwards with estimates of $20 billion by 2007. The training programme is targeted for post graduate students in discipline of physical, mathematical, life sciences, pharmacy or computer applications. Engineering and medicine graduates will also be eligible to enrol for the training programme.