MNNIT, HRI set to fly high on ?Garuda? wings

RESEARCH WORK and experiments requiring solution of complex problems and complicated calculations are all set to receive a never-before thrust at the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT) and Harish-Chandra Research Institute soon.

Both the premiere institutes are among 45 research labs and educational institutions spread across 17 cities of the country that are now part of the proposed national grid computing initiative— 'Garuda'— that the Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is expected to make functional this very month.

The grid's aim: To bring networked computing to research labs and industry and hasten the time to market their technologies.

"A computational grid provides seamless access to various geographically distributed resources such as computers, mass storage and special instruments.
That means it will allow anyone anywhere access to supercomputing power and resources to accelerate progress in science and technology, and thereby the industry," informed MNNIT's Dean (Planning) Prof AK Mishra, whose is the Deemed University's point-man for the project .

He said that C-DAC has been funded by the Department of Information Technology to deploy the nation-wide grid, which will connect 17 Indian cities in its proof of concept (PoC) phase. These include Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Guwahati, Lucknow, Varanasi, Mohali, Kanpur and Thiruvanathapuram.

"In the PoC phase, 45 research labs and educational institutions will be connected through a virtual private network at upto 100 mbps. Each of them will have an access to five to 10 teraflops speed, in addition to what they already possess," he said.

In this phase, applications of national importance that require aggregation of geographically distributed resources and intensive computing and data access will be developed and deployed.

These include disaster management and bioinformatics.

C-DAC, in association with the Space Applications Centre, which conducts space application research and development in satellite communication and remote sensing, will mine data from a network of sensors deployed over vast disaster prone regions and upload it to Garuda as input to forecast models for disaster management.The initiative will make dynamic sharing of resources and virtual collaborations possible among various research institutions of the country thereby, expectedly, giving a push to Indian science, engineering and business.