SCBB is now HiCHiCoB, a BIC of Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India

       In the year 2021, considering the remarkable contributions made by SCBB in the area of Bioinformatics, it was conferred with status of a national Bioinformatics Centre (BIC) of Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. This BIC is named as "The Himalayan Centre for High-throughput Computational Biology (HiCHiCoB)".

About The Studio:Photo gallery

SCBB lab visit by Dr. (Mrs.) N. Kalaiselvi, DG CSIR & Secretary DSIR

Though Bioinformatics has been practiced in IHBT for long time, the formal Bioinformatics Unit under the name of "Studio of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics" became functional in January 2010 and was properly established with lab area and infrastructure in June 2010, under the Biotech Division, with keen interest and effort taken by the director of the Institute, Dr. P.S. Ahuja. The objective of studio is to make IHBT self sufficient for Bioinformatics related projects, participate in the various ongoing projects where Bioinformatics expertise is required and take novel initiatives. The studio aims to develop new algorithms, Bioinformatics softwares, servers and dynamic databases and deliver high quality research in the field.

Within such a short span, the Studio of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics today stands as one of the most contemporary Bioinformatics labs of the nation, practicing most advanced approaches and technologies, addressing one of the most challenging topics of the field and competing globally alongwith impressive progress made.

Infrastructure:

The Studio has high speed optical internet connection, medium to high range workstations with ultrasharp monitors, desktops, printers and five 10 KVA UPS. Also the Studio has access to the next generation sequencing facility, Illumina Genome Analyzer II, through a Linux server with ~220 TB storage and 1 TB physical memory. In order to meet the challenges raised by next generations sequencing and systems biology approach, the Studio aims to make a niche in high performance computing by raising and practicing such facilities.

In order to meet its high performance computation needs, The Studio has recently acquired two high performance more than 250 cores and ~300 TB storage based cluster servers, Three high ends rack servers, 3 high end tower servers, Fleet of 10 high end workstations having Tesla K20/40 GPU processors and at least 32 cores, 126GB+ RAM, Seamless 1GB Internet connectivity, Dedicated 350 TB personal network storage, 1 AMD EPYC 7601 based 128 cores, 1 TB RAM, ~220 TB storage server system and 1 AMD EPYC 7302 based 64 cores, 1 TB RAM, ~60 TB storage server system.

Soon more high performance servers with more than 64 cores and Xeon/AMD build processor families are making ways into the Studio to further boost its high performance computing requirements. In order to meet the high throughput data based computation and analysis, the Studio has got 350 TB network storage at present, and will be extended further.

These all hardwares are here to run days and nights for many dream projects to become true: be it computational regulomics and epigenomics, be it the new challenges of next generations sequencing or be it non-codings and gene regulation. With the engines of Linux, some PYTHONS slide through the mystery maze of science, while some PERLS sieve the expressions of nature, to address the CODE of Life and conduct them parallell with C/C++/python. To look towards the world through this window of Linux-Apache-PHP/Django/Neo4J and tell you that. ...With all this and many more to come in the near future, going in sync with the great scenic background of snow clad high mountains of Himalayas and lush green natural forest, with full creative & intellectual liberty, the Studio stands as a great place to work and love your work.

You are welcome to the Studio!

Associated labs with HiCHiCoB are: