Pune: In a landmark move to enhance India’s biomedical and pandemic preparedness capabilities, the Indian Council of Medical Research – National Institute of Virology (ICMR NIV), Pune, has inaugurated its first High Performance Computing cluster – NIV NAKSHATRA HPC facility.
The cutting-edge computational infrastructure is designed to accelerate genomic surveillance, outbreak response, and AI-driven healthcare research.
The NIV NAKSHATRA HPC facility was officially launched by Dr Rajiv Bahl, Secretary of the Department of Health Research and Director General of ICMR.
Developed under the Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM), the facility forms the core of the newly established High Performance Computing Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Hub.
Speaking at the event, Dr Bahl emphasized the significance of advanced computing in achieving the nation’s ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’ vision. “This HPC facility equips us with the digital tools necessary for early disease detection, fast genomic analysis, and better preparedness for future health emergencies,” he stated.
NIV NAKSHATRA HPC facility
The NIV NAKSHATRA HPC cluster includes 12 compute nodes, 700 processing cores, and 1 petabyte of data storage capacity. It is optimized to support a broad range of bioinformatics tasks, including next-generation sequencing, phylogenetics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, and structural bioinformatics.
Dr Naveen Kumar, Director of ICMR-NIV, called it a pivotal asset for rapid, data-driven decision-making during outbreaks. Dr Sarah Cherian, Principal Investigator and Group Leader of Bioinformatics & Data Management, highlighted its role in enabling collaborative research and data sharing across ICMR’s network of institutes and Viral Research and Diagnostic Laboratories (VRDLs).
Initially, five ICMR institutes will benefit from the NIV NAKSHATRA HPC facility, which will also serve as a national repository for genomic sequencing data. The infrastructure is expected to significantly bolster AI-based drug discovery, vaccine development, and advanced disease modeling.
Representatives from Netweb Technologies, the deployment partner, as well as senior ICMR officials Dr Sanghmitra Pati and Dr Nivedita Gupta, attended the inaugural ceremony.
The launch of the NIV Pune NAKSHATRA HPC facility marks a strategic advancement in India’s scientific and public health ecosystem – ushering in a new era of data-driven precision in combating infectious diseases.
