IBM Propels Innovations at IIT Bombay edifies High Performance Computing Research Facility
IBM and IIT Bombay have opened the first OpenPOWER Research Facility (OPRF) at IIT Bombay. The first of its kind research facility is sought to drive the country’s National Knowledge Network initiative to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborative research and innovation.
With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developers and enterprises who are a part of the National Knowledge Network initiative can tap into the latest and best available OpenPOWER-based infrastructure, including the POWER processor, NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Mellanox networking solutions.
“OPRF at IIT Bombay supports an open technology ecosystem for high-performance computing and its applications. OPRF gives opportunities to students, faculty, and researchers to gain familiarity with OpenPOWER system features, and make contributions to the OpenPOWER foundation in terms of power processor, GPU acceleration, network adapters/switches and application codes. In terms of its objectives and activities, OPRF aligns well with the recently-launched National Supercomputing Mission of Government of India,” said Prof. P. S. V. Nataraj, Professor and Principal Investigator, IIT Bombay.
The new research hub will enable PhD scholars, MTech and engineering students to develop new age applications and solutions around eGovernance, healthcare, education, agriculture and high-performance computing.
“Open collaboration is driving the next wave of innovation across the entire system stack, allowing clients and organizations to develop customized solutions to capitalize on today’s emerging workloads,’ said Monica Aggarwal, Vice President, India Systems Development Lab (ISDL), IBM Systems. “The OPRF will enable Indian companies, universities and government organizations to build technologies indigenously using the high-performance POWER processor, helping to drive the national IT agenda of India,” she added.
The community co-founded by IBM aligning NVIDIA and Mellanox – to support open development on the POWER architecture and is also sought to provide India’s large research and development community with technical assistance and infrastructure to further indigenous research.
