As part of this role I am routinely involved in reviewing current technologies and solutions to identify suitable products for SERC. I also play a role in identifying and addressing the changing requirements of SERC as part of Capacity Planning and deployment exercise. As part of this, I have been in various technical committees for systems procurement, time and again, and have successfully deployed more 100 Unix systems of various categories, from high-end workstations and graphics systems to multiprocessor servers and super-computers.
The most recent of such an activity was the latest procurement by SERC to upgrade its existing compute facility. The state-of-the-art central computing facility at the SERC was created to meet the exacting demands of computation of the academic community involved in front-line research and education. This has been responsible for a rapid growth of computer based research, development and teaching at the institute. The computing facility at SERC boasts a number of top-of-the-line access workstations, powerful compute servers supporting both serial and parallel modes of computing, and a cluster of file servers, all networked together. All the systems support UNIX environment and offer a good program development environment, with standard compilers and tools, mathematical and graphics libraries and a good suite of application software.
The whole of the process usually takes around 6-8 months of continuous effort by SERC personnel. In the course of last seven years SERC has deployed, several facility additions like the IBM-Blue-Gene system, IBM-P575 system, Tesla, Dell, Fermi and Tyrone clusters, the Ganga visualization workstations and the IBM 130Tb SAN storage. Apart from these, on behalf of SERC, I have been instrumental in evaluation, testing, and deploying the technologies for the IISc. undergraduate computing lab. For the first time, SERC has successfully deployed the Zero-clients from M/s N-Computing for scientific applications in the undegraduate computing lab.