Teraflop Grid Computing facility at CDAC

Updated on: Tuesday, March 02, 2010

In order to facilitate advanced scientific research through high power computing resources, a ‘Teraflop Grid Computing Facility' was instituted at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) at JNTU campus in Hyderabad on Thursday.

With 40 computing nodes, one head node, compilation node, file server and 20 Terabytes SATA storage with infiniband interconnection between nodes, the facility, first of its kind in the State, will be useful for students and researchers working in advanced areas like fluid dynamics, molecular modelling, genome sequences, computational atmospheric sciences, seismic data processing, crypto analysis, VLSI design, information security, multimedia technology etc that require high speed computational performance applications.

Vice Chancellor, JNTUH D. Narasimha Reddy inaugurated the facility in the presence of Controller of Certifying Authority (CCA), Government of India, Dr. N. Vijayaditya here on Thursday morning.

Part of the nationwide computational grid computing facility Garuda network, the four Teraflop super computing facility here will facilitate access to up to 100 Teraflop computational power throughout the country, said Sarat Chandra Babu, director, C-DAC, Hyderabad. Garuda is a high speed network connecting the PARAM series of super computers hosted at different geographical locations. It connects 45 premier research and educational institutes in 17 locations across the country, it was stated.

The ‘Grid-Garuda' network, in turn, will soon be part of the National Knowledge Network initiative that will connect major academic institutes across the country, said one Mangala of the Garuda team from Bangalore present on the occasion. This would greatly assist in e-learning and sharing of knowledge and infrastructure resources among the networked institutes.

The new super computing facility that cost around Rs.6 crore will help C-DAC research collaborative grid learning. The centre has already tied up with JNTUH and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) to offer advanced programme in Bioinformatics and its own Diploma in Advanced Scientific Computing. We are also looking for partnerships with various scientific research institutes and industry to make use of this facility, Dr. Babu said.

Lauding the launch of the grid computing facility at C-DAC, Prof. Reddy said it would greatly aid students from different engineering disciplines. “This facility can help over 3 lakh students studying with our university. We can make up for lack of adequate number of qualified faculty through e-learning,” he said requesting C-DAC to assist the university in developing e-learning solutions.

He also offered to provide “necessary resources” from the university side for establishing a 100 Teraflop grid computing facility at JNTUH.

Identifying mobile phones as a technology that holds a lot of promise, Dr. Vijayaditya identified JNTUH with having all facilities – security, hardware, application and testing groups for developing the technology. “Most importantly, it has this facility to develop the technology,” he said.

Teraflop Grid Computing facility at CDAC

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