The Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) is the country’s leading computing centre having the state-of-the art computing facilities, catering to the ever-increasing demands of high-performance computing for scientific and engineering research. The supercomputing facility at SERC is a symbiosis of computing, network, graphics, and visualization. The Centre is conceived of as a functionally distributed supercomputing environment, housing state-of-the-art computing systems, with sophisticated software packages, and connected by a powerful high-speed network.
Following presents a brief overview of the computing environment at SERC :
Cray XC40 called as SahasraT,India’s fastest Supercomputer housed on Eight cabinets of 1506 nodes producing the peak performance of 1.45PFLOPS and Four cabinets of DDN storage with a 2PB usable space.
Storage File Server: Two file servers maintain High Availability by the use of PCS HA cluster software, Intel Hardware key and software paired with the Intel RS3SC008 controllers. The file servers are configured in Active/Active mode along with Dual Expander JBODs in a DAS setup, each exporting a set of NFS shares to SahasraT (Cray-XC40), SERC HPC Clusters and the access workstations. The total raw storage capacity is 100TB out of which the usable storage space is 88TB (Configured in RAID 6 ). Out of 88TB of disk space, 44TB is for hosting user home areas while the remaining 44TB is dedicated for maintaining backups. Read more….
Large pool of Unix workstations such as,SUN Ultra 20, HP XW6400, GANGA, & Dell Precision T1700enable users to access the high-end servers at SERC. The Unix workstation cluster is equally complemented by a cluster of Intel Pentium running Linux OS.
General-purpose numerical packages, such as MatLab, Mathematica & Maple , along with architecture-specific matmematical libraries, such as IMSL, ESSL, SCSL, DXML, and MLIB, and a collection of special purpose packages like Software for Computational Chemistry such as Gaussian with Gaussview, Software for Material Science groups, such as the Accelrys, Cerius and Material Studio suites, software for Life Sciences Groups, such as Accelrys, Insight, Tripos etc., supplement the advanced hardware at SERC.
The switched Gigabit Ethernet backbone of the SERC Local Area Network provides dedicated 100/1000 Mbps connectivity to each workstation/ server at SERC. The SERC network is also connected to the campus-wide full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet backbone, providing gigabit-speed bandwidth across different departments of the Institute.
Support infrastructure comprising of a 600 KVA UPS, 1.5 MW DG Sets, 2MW Electrical Sub-station and nearly 600 TR of Air-conditioning enable 24×7 operation of the Centre, thereby providing uninterrupted network and computing services to the users.
