HPC Cluster at Research Institute - Odisha

1. Background and Objective

The institute recognized the need for a robust High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. The objective was to accelerate multidisciplinary research in bioinformatics, physics, chemistry, and engineering through a scalable and high-throughput computing cluster.

The institute’s prior computational setup was insufficient to support growing simulation workloads, advanced scientific models, and data-intensive tasks. Therefore, the deployment of a modern HPC system aimed to reduce compute times, foster collaborative research, and enable the use of GPU-accelerated applications for cutting-edge scientific problems.

2. Installation Overview

Hardware Configuration

  • HPC Cluster with more than 30 CPU Nodes & 14 GPU Nodes connected over high-speed InfiniBand switches provide low-latency, high-bandwidth communication essential for parallel processing and data exchange across nodes.

Software and Management

  • A secure, enterprise-grade Linux distribution serves as the base operating system.
  • Cluster management tools enable efficient job scheduling, resource allocation, and monitoring.
  • Scientific software environments, including MPI libraries and domain-specific packages, are pre-installed for researcher productivity.
  • Web-based dashboards and centralized logging facilitate real-time monitoring and troubleshooting.

3. Performance and Benefits

  • Achieved a peak computational performance exceeding 250 TFLOPS (double-precision), enabling execution of complex simulations and data analytics.
  • The combination of GPU-accelerated and CPU-based nodes supports diverse workloads, from parallel numerical simulations to AI-driven analyses.
  • High-speed InfiniBand interconnects reduce inter-node communication latency to below 2 microseconds, crucial for tightly coupled computations.
  • Storage subsystem and network architecture ensure fast, reliable access to large datasets, boosting research throughput.

This installation reinforces Institute’s commitment to cutting-edge scientific research infrastructure, empowering its researchers to tackle complex challenges efficiently.