Warft

WARFT or WAran Research FoundaTion is a nonprofit organization promoting interdisciplinary research among undergraduate students in the city of Chennai, India. Professor N. Venkateswaran founded the group in 2000 and continues to manage it as of 2011. The aim of WARFT is to understand and model the brain to enable drug discovery so that spastic children can live a normal life.

Since its inception, WARFT has researched brain modeling, supercomputing and associated areas. The goal of WARFT is to unravel the connectivity of the human brain regions through the MMINi-DASS project. Biologically accurate brain simulations require massive computational power and thus another research initiative at WARFT is the MIP Project directed towards evolving a design method for the development of a tera-operations supercomputing cluster.

Undergraduate research trainees at WARFT engage themselves in the areas of neuroscience, supercomputing architectures, processor design towards deep sub-micrometre, power-aware computing, low power issues, mixed signal design, fault tolerance and testing, digital signal processing. WARFT conducts Dhi Yantra, a workshop on brain modeling and supercomputing every year.

WARFT's mission is twofold. Firstly to promote innovation and research awareness in the minds of young undergraduate students. In this respect, WARFT conducts a two-year part-time Research Awareness Programme and Training (RAPT) for undergraduate students. Secondly to solve the mysteries of the brain and to hasten the discovery of drugs that can cure brain diseases.

There are two main inter-disciplinary research initiatives at WARFT :

The MMINi-DASS project is a large-scale brain simulation carried out to predict interconnectivity of a specific brain region and makes use of fMRI BOLD response of brain regions. This results in understanding of brain dynamics from the most fundamental level to cognitive and behavioral aspects. Modeling individual brain entities is a challenging task. Predicting their interconnectivity through simulation requires enormous computing power and thus, the project banks on the exponentially increasing computing power and its decreasing cost.

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