Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems

Established	8th October 2002
Location	Zaragoza, Aragón, Spain
Homepage	[http://bifi.unizar.es/ bifi.unizar.es]

The Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) (in Spanish "Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos") is a research centre of the University of Zaragoza whose main objective is to apply computation to the physics of complex systems and biological models.

History

BIFI was founded in October 2002 by a group of lecturers from the Faculty of Science of the University of Zaragoza, belonging to the Theoretical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology departments.

Since November 2003 BIFI is located at "Edificio Cervantes" in the "Corona de Aragón" street of the city of Zaragoza (Spain).

Research lines

The main objective of BIFI is to promote the interdisciplinary cooperation between biologists and physicists in order to apply biocomputation to the development of biological research through its convergence in experimental research.

Following are the main research fields developed at BIFI:

* Complex Materials and Fundamental Physics

* Computing and Supercomputing

* Complex Networks and Society

* Physics of Biological Systems

* Protein-Ligand Interaction

* Protein-Protein Interaction And Electron Transfer

* Protein Folding and Stability

* Molecular Biology and Crystallography

The activities of the Institute include the organization of congresses and seminars periodically. It is also worth to stress the growing number of agreements and collaborations BIFI has established with the industry.

Infrastructures

Currently, BIFI's facilities are located at "Edificio Cervantes" (a former children school of Zaragoza) in the "Corona de Aragón" street of the Aragonese capital.

It is worth to stress the importance of the Supercomputing Laboratory, which hosts more than 200 CPUs spread among the cluster and the grid resources of the Institute, globally exceeding 3 teraFLOPS of computing power. This makes BIFI to be the first supercomputing centre in Aragón and one of the first in Spain.

The equipment of the Biochemistry, Electronics and Crystallography laboratories are remarkable as well.

It is foreseen that during 2008, BIFI will move its headquarters to the new building which is being constructed for the university research insitutes at the campus located in the Actur district of Zaragoza.

See also

* University of Zaragoza

External links

* [http://bifi.unizar.es BIFI official website]
* [http://www.unizar.es University of Zaragoza]
* [http://www.aragoninvestiga.org Research in Aragón]