The Visakhapatnam campus of GITAM (Deemed to be University) is home to G-cluster, a state-of-the-art supercomputer, which has been ranked 49th in the list of high-performance supercomputers in India. This cutting-edge technology will give researchers, students, and faculty members unprecedented computing power, allowing them to tackle complex computational problems and push the boundaries of scientific discovery.
The top supercomputer ranking is an initiative of the Government of India run under the National Supercomputing Mission (NCM) to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups. The addition of the G-cluster puts the University on par with premium national research centres in India, giving the research fraternity at GITAM (Deemed to be University) a premium tool to conduct their research that requires high-performance computing capabilities. The aim is to ensure faculty members have access to research equipment 24×7.
While most private Universities subscribe to HPC (High-Performance Computing) services on a public cloud, GITAM (Deemed to be University) chose to have a supercomputing facility at its campus to allow seamless access to research infrastructure without financial constraints for its faculty members. GITAM has allocated over Rs 40 crores to set up its research infrastructure this year.
The goal is to implement an online catalogue and scheduling system for all research equipment, tools, and software, allowing for the viewing and reserving of resources. In the future, faculty members can remotely access the research equipment from any campus at any time.
Talking about the latest addition to the GITAM University campus, Gopal Krishna G, GITAM’s Chief Technology Officer, explained, “The Supercomputer is equipped to handle advanced research, including complex modelling and simulation, which cannot be performed on regular desktops or workstations. It was set up on campus two months ago, and we are still unravelling how it is adding to the capacity of GITAM (Deemed to be University) faculty. Professors were already using the HPC before this, and we had invested in software applications such as ANSYS, Gaussian and others.”
The supercomputer can tackle a wide range of complex computational tasks, such as computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, large-scale statistical analyses, numerical weather and climate prediction, molecular interaction simulations, RNA sequencing analysis, simulations of quasi-brittle structures, and X-ray crystallography, to name a few. G-cluster, housed at the GITAM University campus, has dual Intel Xeon Gold 6326 processors (16 cores and 32 threads, 2.90 GHz, 24 MB) and 256 GB ECC DDR4 RAM configured in a balanced memory configuration. It has 96 TB of Enterprise SAS HDD and 1.92 TB of Enterprise SATA SSD and is equipped with a 100 Gbps high-speed and low-latency network with dual Gigabit LAN ports.