January 31st, 2003 - Pharmaceutical firms are increasingly using high performance computing to process the large amounts of data required to make new drugs. This use of HPC to mine and store genetic data referred to as Bioinformatics is being viewed as the next big opportunity for Tata Elxsi, the product design arm of the Tata Group.

Tata Elxsi officials said Pharma companies are looking to make use of collections of CPUs and storage devices linked together in a conventional LAN (Local area network) or a grid, called bio-compute farms to enhance their data mining activities. Using such ‘farms’ explained Mr. Ramakrishnan Sankaranarayanan, Worldwide General Manager , Product Design Services division, Tata Elxsi resulted in lower IT administration costs.

Few such farms exist today and the main challenge facing companies such as Tata Elxsi is making the compute power widely available to the research community. Indian companies stand to benefit, Mr. Sankaranarayanan said, as these farms offer relatively low cost access to databases and processing power.

Meanwhile Tata Elxsi sees substantial opportunity in re-engineering applications for grid computing framework. “Tools will be needed for grid monitoring and maintenance. Tools for existing supercomputing architectures will be re-engineered and enhanced for usage on grids”, he said.

Tata Elxsi has a 60-person team working on providing HPC solutions. It expects to increase this by 50% in future. Tata Elxsi’s customers include Accelersys, GE, Toshiba, Hitachi and Lion Biosciences. While no figures are available for the HPC market size, the estimate is around $4 to 5 billion globally and around $25 million to $30 million in India.

Rahul Sachitanand