To build this capacity at Delaware State University and in the communities of South Delaware, the Delmarva Peninsula and the North-East Corridor, DSU plans to establish the Delaware Center for Scientific and Applied Computation (DeSAC). The major goals of DeSAC are to

• Provide efficient service to biomedical researches at DSU, within Delaware and nationwide
• Help DSU students in the sciences and applied math / computer science to better prepare for graduate studies in the fields related to computational biology, bioinformatics, computational physics / chemistry and numerical mathematics
• Enhance and strengthen graduate student research at DSU
• Support efforts of DSU towards establishing PhD programs in areas of importance to the social and economic development of Delaware, with special emphasis on the natural sciences and agriculture
• Boost collaboration between DSU and the industrial community in related research / development fields
• Develop a community of scholars with talent and expertise that will garner regional and national recognition
• Become a natural seed and basis for activities on developing a proposed research incubator at DSU.

The Delaware BRIN has provided the necessary support structure to establish a biotechnology program at DSU and equip it with the essential computing facility that provides students with access to state-of-the-art technology and software in bioinformatics. Dr. Marwan Rasamny and Dr. Dragoljub Pokrajac, both in the DSU Computer and Information Sciences Department, have played a major role in the realization of the bioinformatics core during the Delaware BRIN project. Dr. Rasamny was closely involved in designing the network and purchasing the computers and server that supports bioinformatics. Dr. Pokrajac has played an instrumental role in developing, implementing, and offering the bioinformatics curriculum to support the biotechnology program at DSU.

The biotechnology-training laboratory at DSU presently houses the bioinformatics equipment purchased through funding from the Delaware BRIN that includes a SunFire V880 server with two 750 MHz SPARC processors, 4 GB of memory and 216 GB of disk storage, a 1000 hardware raid disk array with 145 GB of disk storage expandable to over a terabyte of disk storage; 6 SunBlade X3Delite with 500 MHz UltraSPARC – IIe processors and SunPCi co-processor card and 18” TFT displays; and 4Dell Precision workstations with 1.5 GHz Xeon processors and 400 MHz front side bus, nVidia Quadro2 EX graphics card, 512 MB of memory and a 40 GB internal drive.