Computing

The computer facilities at IIA has always been individual based, where most of the academic members of the Institute use their own workstations for complete computing needs. The Computer Centre is intended for the use of visitors (mostly project students) and for servers. High performance computing at IIA consisted of a 20 node cluster based on intel xeon processors, an 8 node Sunfire system and membership in the Garuda National Grid Computing Initiative. In the recent times, there has been a rising demand for larger memory, higher processing and storage that are beyond the limits of conventional workstations. The new datacenter is expected to satisfy this rising demand for computing power and storage.

Computing Facilities

• Cygnus: Dual opteron 6176SE (2.3GHz, 12 cores, 6.4GT/s), 32 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory, 2.3TB SAS disks (RAID5). More information, list of installed Astronomy software and setup documentation can be found on cygnus info page
   
• Fornax: Dual opteron 6220 (3.0 GHz, 8 cores, 6.4 GT/s), 128 GB 1333 MHz DDR2 memory, 900 GB 10k RPM SAS disks (RAID1). This server is primarily for memory intensive simulations. More information, list of installed Astronomy software and setup documentation can be found on fornax info page
   
• Kaspar: Dual Xeon X5675 (3.06GHz, 6 cores, 6.4GT/s), 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory, 2.0TB SATA disks, four NVIDIA C2070 Tesla cards (448 cuda cores, 6GB GDDR5 memory per card) for GPU based parallel computing. More information, list of installed Astronomy software and setup documentation can be found on kaspar info page
   
• Hydra Cluster: 20 Node High Performance Computing Cluster, with a peak computing power of 3.2 TF. More information, usage help and documentation is available on Hydra info page.

On the storage front, we have a 36 TB IP-SAN disk server. The 20 node cluster has an associated storage module of 48TB raw disk space. These are new additions, alongside the existing 10TB disk server.

IIA has always been a source of astronomical data. The new datacenter will host data from Institute's observatories. Starting with the 100+ years of digitized solar images from Kodaikanal Solar Observatory to the optical telescopes and upcoming space astronomy missions, all data will be made available through the datacenter. Work is in progress to prepare a common interface to provide access to these data.

Internet bandwidth has been upgraded recently to 40 Mbps. A secondary internet link from National Knowledge Network (NKN) offers a total bandwidth of 1 Gbps, shared by various research institutes in Bangalore. Institute's LAN is on a 1 Gbps high speed network infrastructure. Field stations at Gauribidanur, CREST and Kodaikanal are now part of main campus LAN via MPLS network.