BIOINFORMATICS, AN ESSENTIAL TOOL FOR BIOLOGISTS.

• Position: Use of the the Tera super-calculator

Geneticists, who rely on bioinformatics specialists to interpret a huge volume of raw data, will henceforth benefit from the support of a super-calculator used in simulating nuclear tests. The amount of raw data available in biology doubles each year, according to Pierre Tambourin, chairman of Genopole d'Evry (France). Speaking at a press conference on February 28, he welcomed the decision of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to make available to scientists the Tera super-calculator, the most powerful in Europe and the seventh most powerful in the world. With 2,560 interconnected processors, the computer is able to perform 2 billion 14-figure operations per second. "The cultural challenge of the century will be to process the billions of pieces of complex information which have been made available to scientists since the sequencing of the human genome three years ago, with a view to reconstructing a theory of life" said Bernard Pau, director of the Life Sciences department at the French national research centre, the CNRS. Sequencing, from bacteria to man, represented an achievement, but above all it marked the beginning of research into understanding how life works," Mr Pau said, who was speaking at Genopole d'Evry as part of an international conference on intensive calculations for use by geneticists. "Not only must we be able to count the number of proteins in a cell, we must also be able to imagine the dynamic interactions between them which make life possible. The...