The Teraflop Grid Computing Facility established at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), JNTU campus, Kukatpally was inaugurated on Thursday.

Inaugurating this facility, D N Reddy, vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, explained that this Grid facility will be allowing anyone, anywhere and anytime access to very high power computing resources for advanced scientific research.

N Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying Authority (CCA), Government of India insisted that this facility should be effectively utilised by various organisations for their advanced computational requirements.

Dr Sarat Chandra Babu, Director of C-DAC, Hyderabad said that this 4 Teraflop Grid Computing facility is part of Nation-wide Computational Grid called GARUDA Network. It will cater to various high performance applications including Bioinformatics, Molecular Modelling, Computational Atmospheric Sciences, Seismic data processing.

C-DAC will make use of this facility for research on Collaborative Grid Learning and also as a platform for training in Advanced Program in Bioinformatics jointly with JNTU Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) and its new Diploma in Advanced Scientific Computing. The centre is also looking for partnerships with various Scientific Research Institutes and Industry for making use of the facility. Grid Garuda Project is spearheaded by C-DAC, Knowledge Park centre at Bangalore, with nodes of varying capacities located at many C-DAC centres.

High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC) is one of the key areas of research and development in C-DAC. The PARAM series of super-computers which are hosted at different geographical locations can be connected through Garuda network, which consists of 45 premier research and educational institutes in 17 locations across India. ‘Garuda’ is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nationwide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide the technological advances required to compute intensive scientific data for the 21st century.