Garuda
GRID GARUDA initiative is a collaboration of the Scientific, Engineering and Academic Community to carry-out research and experimentation on a nationwide grid of computational nodes, mass storage that aims to provide the distributed data and compute intensive High Performance Computing solutions for the 21st century.
The Department of Information Technology (DIT) has funded the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to deploy the nation-wide computational grid, GARUDA, which today connects 45 institutions across 17 cities, with an aim to bring Grid computing to research labs, industries and academic institutions.
The availability of the efficient, high-speed (Multi Gigabit) network backbone the National Knowledge Network (NKN) and Garuda's migration to NKN gives ample opportunity to exploit the Gigabit speeds for the scientific and engineering applications being run on the GARUDA. Currently the highly reliable and available NKN connects the resources of the Garuda grid with a bandwidth of 1 Gbps, with provisions of QoS and Security.Garuda On NKN.
Computational Resources:
In this collaborative grid project, various resources such as high performance computing systems (HPC) and satellite based communication systems have been committed by different centers of C-DAC and GARUDA partners. The total computational resources available today on Garuda are approximately 65 Teraflops.
Grid Management and Monitoring:
A dedicated Grid monitoring and management centre at C-DAC, Bangalore helps in managing and monitoring all the components in the Grid. State-of-the-art display walls and advanced software like Paryavekshanam developed at C-DAC help in effectively monitoring the health and utilization of various components of the Grid.
Application Profile:
Applications of national importance that require aggregation of geographically distributed resources have been operational on the GARUDA grid. Resource intensive applications from various domains of e-Science such as Bio-informatics, Astrophysics, Computer Aided Engineering, Weather modeling and Seismic data processing - have been provisioned on the operational grid.
GARUDA Partners:
45 research and academic centres, including more than 36 partner institutions, centres of C-DAC are participating in GARUDA. Research has been initiated in Semantic Grid Services, Integrated Development Environments, Storage Resource Managers, Network Simulation and Grid File Systems.
C-DAC is also collaborating in the EU - India Grid project which will allow researchers and scientists across Europe and India to conduct simulation experiments on EGEE and GARUDA grids. Efforts are on to integrate the technology components of both the grids, which would enable the users to access the resources and services across the grids in a secure and seamless manner.