SSSIHL a Deemed University was established in 1981 by Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust which in turn was established by Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. The University provides free education to all its students at all levels. This is a one-of-a-kind institution offering higher education with an emphasis on personality development and value-based learning. In 2004, the University was credited as “Jewel in the crown of the Indian Higher Education system” by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council. It has one of the best student-to-computer ratios in the country. The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMACS) established the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1993. Currently the Department is actively engaged in research in the areas of Mathematical Modelling, Data Science, Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, Information Security and Computer Vision. DMACS is also a recognized GPU Research & Education Centre by NVIDIA. SSSIHL chose Bright technology for two key reasons:
· The Institute’s HPC cluster setup is heterogeneous in nature that uses both Intel and AMD processors. It is also a hybrid cluster that has several NVIDIA Tesla and Kepler GPUs installed to accelerate the GPU aware codes, as well as to provide an environment for the students and researchers to write programmes that are optimised for the GPU hardware and software. The Institute needed user-friendly cluster management software to manage the entire cluster. Bright met this requirement perfectly.
· The failover capability of the master node offered by Bright is an especially appealing feature for the Institute. The users wanted to build an environment that offered seamless access to computing resources, even in the unlikely event of failure of any of the two master nodes.
Venkat Ramana, Director of HPC at MPCL, commented; “This heterogeneous and hybrid cluster at SSSIHL is the first step towards achieving a self-sufficient HPC facility for the Institute’s research work, and we are pleased that Bright is the technology underpinning the project.”
Clemens Engler, VP EMEA Business Development at Bright Computing, added; “MPCL is proving itself to be a very dynamic partner for Bright in India and we are delighted to work together to bring this exciting project onto Bright technology.”
