Friday, July 20, 2012:
The two day GARUDA-NKN Partners Meet was inaugurated today at the NIAS Auditorium, IISC, Bangalore. The meet is organised by C-DAC in association with National Informatics Centre (NIC). Senior delegates from the scientific, academic and Government institutes partnering with NKN and Grid GARUDA are participating in the meet.
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Dr. Vijay P. Bhatkar, Chairman IIT-Delhi and Founder Executive Director C-DAC, while inaugurating the event said “India started with knowledge and knowledge is its destiny. In High performance computing, India is at the threshold of entering Peta and Exa Scale Computing. However, with the present technology, Exa Scale cannot be achieved. Disruptive and innovative technologies are required and that’s the grand challenge of Scientific community.” He said that the challenges do no end there and urged the scientific community to develop applications in pursuit of humanity, health, social network and entertainment.
He recalled that HPC (High Performance Computing) cannot be separated from broadband connectivity and both are interdependent. “We need to propel India in Computing and be a leader in HPC. To work in this regard we need to build capability through simulation of science, data discovery, and collaborative communication.” Further, he stressed upon the need for new management structure which enables cooperation and collaboration among the institutes. “21st century belongs to India and we should leverage all the opportunities it provides and look as Team India and India First” he concluded.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Muralikrishna Kumar, Senior Advisor, Planning Commission, Govt. of India mentioned that the 12th Five year plan has started with a lot of expectations in the area of HPC and we need to go ahead in HPC to solve National problems. In order to achieve this, we need to create a strong ecosystems and manpower. This also entails development of suit of applications for supercomputing facility and another challenge is the security of such resources and the network.
Welcoming the gathering Prof. Rajat Moona, Director General, CDAC outlined the roadmap of CDAC on Grid, Cloud and High Performance computing. He also stressed on the role of the technology to increase productivity and the skills of the work force. He indicated that with Giga bits of high speed networks, the geographically spread computing systems give a feel that they are located at one place.
Dr. Sarat Chandra Babu, Executive Director, C-DAC, Bangalore proposed the vote of thanks.
Shri. Ramakrishnan, Former Director General, CDAC, Shri Venkateshan, Deputy Director General, NIC and Shri. B.K.Murthy, Sr. Director, DeitY were present on the occasion.
These high-end scientific explorations using the high speed and scalable National Knowledge Network on Grid GARUDA resources aim to lead to the following.
· Drug discovery - Leading to low-cost medicines
· Screening possible drug targets for metabolic disorders from traditional medicinal plants
· Evolutionary studies of genes and proteins; Protein structure prediction to help in drug design
· Seasonal prediction for Indian Monsoon – Leading to help farmers to plan their cultivation
· CAE - Assist to bring engineering revolutions in the fields of aerospace engineering etc.
· Disaster management - Aiding the decision makers to reduce the disaster impact
· e-learning – Improving the quality of education by sharing knowledge from reputed institutions like IITs and NITs
GARUDA Project has been spearheaded by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Knowledge Park, Bangalore and supported by Department of Electronics Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, with an aim to provide the technological advances required to enable Data & Compute intensive Science and Engineering Applications for the 21st Century.
‘A Computational Grid is a collection of resources owned by multiple organizations that is coordinated, to allow them to solve a common problem’- Gartner Report. GARUDA is a Nation-wide Grid spread over several cities of the country, comprising of computational nodes, mass storage, scientific instruments and collaboration of science researchers, with an aim to bring "Grid” networked computing research, to facilitate scientific, engineering solutions for socio-economic development. The GARUDA computing and storage resources are made available over high speed National Knowledge Network (NKN).
The NKN is Government of India initiative to catalyse Knowledge Sharing seamlessly, across the Nation. It is a High Capacity, Highly Scalable Backbone like a National Cyber Highway to enable different initiatives to leverage on this common infrastructure. The fundamental objective of NKN is to connect 1500+ institutes from academia and research community, as such 781 institutes are already connected.
As the research and innovation are shifting to multidisciplinary and collaborative paradigms, which entail substantial communication and computational power, NKN with its multi-gigabit bandwidth, mitigate largely such gaps in e- infrastructure. Further NKN provides international connectivity to its users for global collaborative research. Presently, NKN is connected to Trans Eurasia Information Network (TEIN3) and similar connectivity to few other research networks is in the pipeline. Sixty six virtual classrooms have been created at various institutes across the country. All virtual classrooms are equipped with state of the art teaching cum learning infrastructure.
Secured access to GARUDA Grid is guaranteed through Certificates signed by the Indian Grid Certification Authority (IGCA). The IGCA has been set up by C-DAC and accredited by the APGridPMA. IGCA ensures secured access and address requirements on interoperability across international grids. Grid computing promises an innovative approach that leverages existing IT infrastructure to optimise compute resources and manage data and computing workloads. Presently, in the Operational Phase, GARUDA Grid aims to provide stable, robust and efficient grid environment with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for various applications.
The grid computing played a big role in recently announced discovery of Higgs - boson particle (aka. God particle) by European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN near Geneva. Garuda also played a role by providing secured Indian Grid Certificate Authority (IGCA) certificates for the Indian scientists participated in this experiment.
The Proof-of-Concept and Foundation Phases of GARUDA have demonstrated the benefits of grid computing for applications which have huge compute-storage-instrument-collaboration requirements. Applications such as Flood Data Processing, Numerical Weather Simulations, Aero Acoustic Modelling, Life Sciences and Collaborative Classrooms, etc. have been prototyped on GARUDA grid to demonstrate its capabilities.
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