Supercomputing Facility in ICAR

24th September 2013, New Delhi

A supercomputing facility under the National Agricultural Innovation Project’s (NAIP) subproject entitled “Establishment of National Agricultural Bioinformatics Grid (NABG) in ICAR” has been created at Centre for Agricultural Bioinformatics (CABin), Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi.

This supercomputing environment is being developed for high-end computing in the field of Computational Biology and Agricultural Bioinformatics. The platform is useful for analysis and storage of genomic data resources and visualization of different biological databases. The facility is set up with the state of art data centre. The computing facility consists with hybrid architecture of computing having 256 nodes Linux cluster with two masters, 16 nodes windows cluster, 16 nodes GPU cluster and one SMP based machine along with storage consists of 200 TB of Network Attached Storage (NAS server), 100 TB of high performance Parallel File System (PFS) based Storage and 200 TB of NAS as archival.

This national grid consists of specific agricultural domains at five centres namely NBAGR, Karnal; NBPGR, New Delhi; NBFGR, Lucknow; NBAIM, Mau and NBAII, Bangaluru. The configuration of these domains are 16 nodes Linux cluster with 20 TB of Network Attached Storage (NFS server) and 20 TB of High Performance Parallel File System based Storage. The technical configurations are same as the central facility. All these clusters will be interlinked through NKN/MPLS network connectivity and available to the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) users very soon through a web portal. The web portal will provide a platform for the inter-disciplinary research in cross-species genomics in agriculture.

(Source: IASRI, New Delhi)