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 and project students. High performance computing at IIA consisted of a 20 node cluster based on intel xeon processors. 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.

Computing Facilities

  • Delphinus:

    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2643 v3 (3.40 GHz, 12 cores, 9.6 GT/s), 64 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 memory, 4TB NL-SAS disks (RAID5). More information, list of installed Astronomy software and setup documentation can be found on delphinus info page.

     

  • Fornax:

    Single AMD EPYC 7302P (3.0 GHz, 16 cores, 128 GB L3 Cache), 512 GB DDR4 3200GT/s.

    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

  • NOVA

    It is a 26 Node High Performance Cluster, with a peak performance of 25.4 TF. More information including usage, help and documentation is available on NOVA 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.

Last updated on: March 8, 2024