AR_final file_2018-19

The hardware and devices currently managed by the computing facility include 315 servers and desktops, 75 laptops, 70 printers and scanners, two large HPC systems over a PetaByte of storage, in addition to diverse equipments deployed for an extensive, high throughput wired and wireless campus-wide network. The number of registered Wi-Fi devices is over 800, and e-mail accounts served by the computing facility to members and associates amount to nearly 550. IUCAA has its own registered domain, “iucaa.in” . The WAN services are provided by the National Knowledge Network on a 1 Gbps fibre connectivity, with a fallback arrangement on a 50 Mbps line from TATA VSNL. COMPUTER CENTRE The Computer Centre at IUCAA continues to offer the state-of-the-art computing hardware and technology rich mobile work space for IUCAA Members, Visiting Associates and Visitors. It also extends an array of specialized High Performance Computing (HPC) environments to the academic community for their research. DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE The HPC facility houses some of the major IT assets of IUCAA, and services for general users are provided through the 1504 core 30 TF system, “Perseus”, which also has a 750 TB storage attached to it. The cluster has been available for general use with Load Sharing Facility (LSF) as the job scheduler, and utilized by more than 35 high volume users from IUCAA, and various Indian Universities, running applications for Molecular Scattering, Molecular Dynamics, Stellar Dynamics, Gravitational N-body Simulations, Cosmic Microwave Background Evolution, Fluid Mechanics, Magneto-hydrodynamics, Plasma Physics, and analysis of diverse astronomical data. One major data analysis application has been to compute 35 statistical parameters from each of the 500 Million optical light curves of astronomical sources observed in the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS), by going through the entire repository collected over the years. The Data Centre infrastructure has been augmented to host additional HPC clusters. The existing one, Perseus and the storage attached to it are nearly six years old, and have reached the end of life. Procurement of a new HPC cluster has, therefore, been initiated. In order to host the new cluster and storage, three additional liquid cooling packages (LCP), each having a capacity of 55 KW in n + 1 redundancy, along with racks, were procured and installed. FACILITIES AT IUCAA ( 156 )