July 19, 2012
By V. Ganesh
India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in conjunction with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) plan to use their Garuda initiative to extend grid computing from the current 65 educational institutes to 200 in the next couple of years.
Due to high costs and maintenance of hardware and software, educational institutes could not afford to undertake research that requires super computing. C-DAC’s grid computing initiative is a collection of high performance computing resources that are spread across different cities and would enable underfunded educational institutions to peform such research.
C-DAC provides certain institutions access to resources such as storage, IT networking and advanced servers capable of computing in excess of a trillion calculations per second. Typically, such resources are used for drug discovery, numerical weather simulations, disaster management, aerospace engineering, weather prediction, e-learning and protein structure prediction.
“Our objective is to provide and facilitate collaborative initiatives in grid computing along with partners such as National Knowledge Network (NKN),” said Sarat Chandra Babu, Executive Director of C-DAC.
Grid computing played a major role in the recent discovery of the ‘God particle’ as scientists across the globe collaborated on the project. According to C-DAC officials, Garuda played its part in the discovery by providing certificates for Indian scientists who participated in the project.
The Tinderbox Daily 