Centre for Information Super Highway (CISH)- The Central Computing Facility

The Centre for Information Super Highway is a part of the Centre of Relevance and Excellence (CORE) in Advanced Computing & Information Processing established by the Technology, Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC), Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. This facility at the School of Computing has been constantly upgraded to meet the academic and research needs of the entire campus. M/s Tata communications Lab for Cyber Security, Microsoft Technical Services Lab for Cloud, Tata Realty-Data Science Lab, VLSI Lab, Embedded systems Lab, Microprocessor Lab, NAMASTE Lab and recognitions like Nvidia – CUDA Centre of Excellence makes the facility a world class infrastructure paving way for students and faculty members of SASTRA Deemed University to excel in their respective domains.

To ensure that all students have access to computers and up to date software packages the University has implemented the following:

• 10G LAN and a fully WiFi enabled campus (Hostels and classrooms) gives 24 X 7 access to all the IT resources of the University
• The Central computing facility hosts the HPC Linux Cluster (Petaflop) and is accessible from the User devices for deploying their compute/ memory intensive tasks. It's a hybrid high performance cluster which hosts X86, IBM Power and GPU platform servers with a storage capacity of 80 TBs. The cluster currently hosts Nvidia V100, A100, K80 & K20 GPU cards and has more that 1500 CPU cores and 2 TB of RAM. The cluster is connected with a Mellanox Infiniband switch (HDR) that provides 200 Gbps connectivity between the nodes, minimising the communication time. The HPC is powered by GPFS (General Parallel File System) which delivers a high performance parallel computing environment. The Platform Application Centre(PAC) is used for monitoring and the admin can control the amount of resource utilised by the users. The Load Sharing Facility (LSF) acts as a job scheduler. The queuing system allocates fixed ceiling resources, department-wise so that resources are distributed as per the queuing policy. The HPC hosts environments & applications like X-Scale AI, X-Scale HPC, Ganglia, SciPy, Pandas, PyTorch, CUDA, MPI/Open MP, Schrodinger, Gaussian, TCAD, Gromacs, NAMD, SciLab and R.

• Microsoft campus agreement, gives unlimited access to the Microsoft products for enhancing the teaching/ learning experience. Students, faculty & Lab machines get genuine Microsoft software and OS updates through these subscriptions
• Turnitin access is given to students and faculty members to do the best original work
• The Lab machines, faculty & student Laptops across the campus can be Installed with Matlab (latest edition with updates) which comes through the Campus agreement with Matlab
• Access to Google Classroom (as a part of Google Suite Subscription), helps the students get engaged with their Professors after the class hours, making learning a fun. Every student is given a mail id with - regno(@)sastra.ac.in
• Faculty members can access the campus digital library subscriptions from outside the campus using the KNIMBUS.
• SASTRA follows a BYoD Policy allowing users to bring their own devices. Fully wifi enabled campus with 750 access points connects the National Knowledge Network (1 Gbps) giving round the clock free, unlimited internet access to the inmates of SASTRA. A backup link from Jio with 200 Mbps internet bandwidth adds to the Internet availability in the campus.

In addition CISH as a research lab focuses on research relating to Network Security, Cloud Computing, Machine & Deep Learning and Brain-Computing Interface and has attracted funds from various National and International funding agencies like ICPS-DST, MHRD, MeitY, TatatPower, TCS, IBMSUR, etc. to a tune of Rs 4 crores.