High Performance Computing Lab

Scientific Computing and Communication Group

The group manages

High Performance Computing Facility.
Academic and Administrative Computing
Local Area Network and Internet Services
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project
ICT services
IP telephony

High Performance Computing Facility

(a) Existing Supercomputing Facility at IUAC

It was setup in 2010 with the grant from the Department of Science and Technology (India). It has 200 compute nodes, 3200 cores and 55 TB of parallel file storage system with a total computing capability of 65 Teraflops Thirty-three research articles were published in international journals in the very first five years of operation using this facility. This facility was being used by more than 500 users from universities, institutes and research labs across the country till 2019 and now being utilized internally by IUAC students and for training purposes.

Photograph of a section of the existing supercomputing facility

Block diagram of the existing supercomputing facility

(b) Upcoming 3 Petaflops Supercomputing Facility

IUAC is preparing for the installation of the 3 petaflops High-Performance Computing system at IUAC under the umbrella of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY). The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with CDAC in March 2022. The facility is proposed to have a 4 Petabyte of Storage capacity and 240Gbps interconnect. The compute nodes have been designed and manufactured in the country with the Dual Socket Intel Xeon 2nd Gen scalable processor up to 24 cores each. The facility will be made available to all the researchers and students working in the field of computation and interdisciplinary research.

Layout of the upcoming supercomputing facility at IUAC

Academic and Administrative Computing

The group maintains several central servers, LTS terminals, PCs, Printers and work stations for administrative computing. Similarly, there are about 200 personal computers and notebooks, network printers and MFCs for academic computing.

Local Area Network and Internet Services

The LAN and internet services are being managed through several wired core switches, wired edge switches, wireless POE switches and controllers and wireless access points. The primary internet services are provided by National Knowledge Network (NKN) with 1:1 connection of bandwidth 1 Gbps. For redundancy purposes, the secondary link of bandwidth 20 Mbps is being provided by a vendor. Firewall services with adequate redundancy are also provided to obtain network security.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project

The ERP is in-house developed and maintained by the group. The project integrates various administrative sections of the office like Personnel, Finance and Accounts, Stores and Purchase and Estate on a single platform and envisages a paperless office. The Project uses Open Source Technologies like Linux, PHP and Postgres. Academic institutions have shown interest towards implementing the ERP project in their institute. The required changes/updates as requested by accounts/stores/personnel section are regularly implemented.

ICT services

In order to follow social distancing protocol during the ongoing pandemic, Video-conferencing has provided the way forward in conducting meetings as well as providing support to academic programs. A dedicated webex and google cloud services are set up for conducting the online workshops, schools and conferences. The events listed in the academic calendar are being organized using these platforms whenever required in virtual mode. This has enabled us for a wider range of participants across the nation and removed the constraints on the number of participants due constraint of physical space and long-distance travel to attend programs at IUAC. Ph.D. classroom programs are conducted in online mode. Support for online participation certificate in the events and admit card for tests has been provided by the group. A learning management system is also made with an open source package known as 'moodle'. This system can serve as the platform for delivering lectures, giving assignments and evaluating them, taking quizzes etc. for faculty members. This facility along with video conferencing can be utilized by the university community in future to become the cornerstone in developing an online learning ecosystem for the university teaching system.

IP Telephony

New Matrix IP PBX was installed in April 2021. It is equipped with 300 Analog/TDM lines with about 291 TDM lines operating. There are few digital phones, over hundred IP phones and mobile phones serviced through this PBX.