Panaji, February 22 2018: Goa state is exploring the possibility of installing supercomputers at education institutes in Goa, said its IT minister Rohan Khaunte. He was speaking at a two-day national PARAM Shavak user summit here last week.
Param Shavak is C-DAC's new desktop 3 teraflop supercomputer. An advanced version of this machine optimised for Virtual Reality was launched at the Goa summit.
Goa Universityalready has two PARAM Shavaks, while NIT Goa has ordered two units of which the first will be deliveed in early March 2018. C-DAC Director General Hemat Darbari said “We are in talks with BITS Pilani, Goa to install a Shavak there."
The table-top supercomputer is expected to give a new fillip to cancer research, suggested C-DAC scientists. "We have interacted with Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumba and National Cancer Institute in US for doing simulation on ‘P53’ molecule on our system,”added Dr Darbari. P53’, also known as TP53 or tumor protein is a gene that codes for a protein that regulates the cell cycle and hence functions as tumor suppressor.
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Technical details of PARAM Shavak here
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C-DAC is also working on drug repurposing or repositioning -- the application of known drugs and compounds to treat new diseases. Specifically the Centre is working on drugs used for diabetes can be used for breast cancer research.
The C-DAC DG suggested that Param Shavak can be used in healthcare for drug discovery research like in area of cancer, battle theatre simulation for defence (battle inoculation) advertising, education, automobile engineering and even archeology. Ancient extinct kingdoms like Dwarka and civilizations like Harappa can be recreated by visualizing the original structures using simulators providing multidimensional images.