Persistent Systems has awarded a $100,000 academic research grant to Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing to fund research efforts in the Persistent Indiana Research Center — a research and development incubator that the company has set up in collaboration with IU.
The funds, which will be shared equally between two doctoral students, will sponsor efforts to develop bioinformatics algorithms, software, and workflows that can be used in clinical applications of next-generation sequencing techniques and mass spectrometry as well as in developing computational tools for public and commercial clouds.
The money will also support a project focused on building cloud infrastructure and implementations of Iterative MapReduce and OpenStack, Persistent said.
Persistent expects PIRC's research efforts to extend its cloud computing and life sciences expertise. The company currently makes its bread and butter by providing software product development services to the life sciences and other markets including healthcare, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods, and financial services
In a statement, Anand Deshpande, chairman and CEO of Persistent Systems, identified cloud computing, bioinformatics, and NGS as "areas of active research" for the company, where it hopes to "foster new ideas and technology innovations" through its partnership with IU.
Last year, Life Technologies tapped Persistent to rebuild the software for its 3500 Dx capillary electrophoresis sequencing system to ensure that it meets US Food and Drug Administration Agency's regulatory requirements (BI 7/8/2011).
In June, Persistent bought Agilent Technologies' Grenoble, France-based software marketing and development business, which provides data acquisition and control software for scientific instruments to the life science, environmental, energy, applied research, and other markets (BI 6/3/2011).