S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences

Under Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India

Computer Services Cell - Computer Facilities

Computer Services Cell (CSC) serves the computational needs of the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. The primary responsibilities of the CSC is to facilitate the centre with an uninterrupted computational services and is officially responsible for the provision of central computing facilities and technical services to support the following aspects of computer and network within the centre.

Overview of CSC responsibilities

  • Day to day Maintenance of centre's computational and networking equipments and planning for better service.
  • Maintenance of centre's Computer Hardware, Operating System and Softwares.
  • Maintenance of center's Network.
  • Maintenance of Computing Clusters.
  • Maintenance of centre's Servers (DNS & DHCP, Web, Email, Intranet, NFS, Antivirus, VPN).
  • Maintenance of Website and other online services.
  • Facilitated with individual email account.


1. CSC Organization Structure

As a concern to the better services, the CSC is formed by two committees -

1.1 Computer Services Cell Advisory Committee (CSC-APHEP)

CSC-APHEP is formed by 10 members and chaired by Prof. Amitabha Lahiri. CSC-APHEP provides general planning of the growth of computational facilities and makes broad policies as are needed for efficient running of those facilities included policy of allotment of slots to users.

1.2 Computer Services Cell Working Group (CSC-WG)

CSC-WG is formed by 11 members and chaired by Prof. Jaydeb Chakrabarti. CSC-WG provides day-to-day operational activities along with time-to-time measures of facilities for the very high utilization rate of computational equipments and uninterrupted services.

2. Equipments under CSC

Currently CSC provides services to approximately 350 users including faculties, staff members, and students, and handles more than 400 workstations; 20 black & white and 10 color local and network printers; 5 Scanners; 10 servers; 5 computational clusters. CSC also looking after 2 leased line networks of 1.0 Gbps and 50 Mbps speed for the internet and intranet access. The cell manages 1 router; 3 layer-3 and 16 layer-2 switches; 17 wifi access points, 1 WLC. The internal backbone of SNBOSE network is designed with fiber optic channels for the high speed communication. CSC also provides Virtual Private Network (VPN) access to the restricted users to facilitate local network access from outside internal network.

3. Facilities provided by CSC

3.1. Workstations

CSC provides more than 400 dedicated workstations (HP, Dell PCs) to all faculty, students and staff members to meet individual personal requirement and freedom of work. Fedora, Ubuntu is installed in most of the workstations. Scientific tools are installed as required.

Every workstations along with all other equipments used by CSC are connected with dedicated or centralized power backup (UPS) for the uninterrupted operations.

3.2. Network

CSC is dedicated to facilitate SNBNCBS users with intranet and internet facility on 24X7 basis. The Intranet (Local Area Network) access facility supports both wire and wireless connectivity. The intranet backbone is build up with 3 CISCO manageable (Layer-3) switches and they are interlinked with fiber optic cables. The backbone is supported by 16 layer-2 switches. The wired intranet access provides upto 1 Gbps speed.

A wireless network supporting uninterrupted wireless intranet access to the mobile devices, covers the main building of the centre and guest house. The Wi-fi facility uses high end CISCO wireless access points. Recently CSC extended Wi-fi infrastructure by implementing Wireless Lan Controller (WLC) in intranet.

For the Internet facilities currently CSC leased 2 internet lease lines from 2 different providers. They are as follows -

  • 1.0 Gbps primary lease line provided by National Knowledge Network (NKN).
  • 50 Mbps secondary lease line provided by Airtel India Pvt. Limited.

3.3 Computational Clusters

For the powerful experiments CSC have 5 computation clusters. Where users can submit their jobs either Parallel or Serial.

  • Clusters for parallel execution
  • Clusters for serial execution
      Polaron: Computation Cluster for Serial Computing spread across 1 master node with 2 x Intel@ Xeon SKL-SP 4110 8C/16T 2.1Ghz 11M 9.6GT UPI,(128GB) 4 x 32 GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM RAM, 2 x 4000GB, 7200 RPM, Enterprise SATA HDD, 4 compute nodes with 2 x Intel@ Xeon@ 6Core/12 Threads and 3.4Ghz 19.25M 10.4GT UPI, (256GB) 8 x 32 GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM RAM and 2 x 4000GB, 7200 RPM, Enterprise SATA HDD, 1 compute nodes with 2 x Intel@ Xeon@ scalable processor 18C/36T and 3Ghz 24.75M 10.4GT UPI , 512GB) 16 x 32 GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM RAM and 2 x 4000GB, 7200 RPM, Enterprise SATA HDD and and 1 compute nodes with 2 x Intel® Xeon® scalable processor atleast 18C/36T and 3Ghz 24.75M 10.4GT UPI,(1024GB) 16 x 64 GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM RAM , 2 x 4000GB, 7200 RPM, Enterprise SATA HDD.Photon info page

      Photon: Computation Cluster for Serial Computing spread across 1 master and 7 compute nodes with Dual 6 core Intel ® Xeon ® E5650 @ 2.67 GHz CPU, 24GB RAM (84 Processing cores) and over 800GB scratch area per node.Photon info page


      Phonon: Computation Cluster for Serial Computing spread across 1 master and 7 compute nodes with Dual 6 core Intel ® Xeon ® E5650 @ 2.67 GHz CPU, 24GB RAM (84 Processing cores) and over 800GB scratch area per node.Phonon info page

      Unit on Nanoscience and Technology (UNANST): High Performance Computational Cluster for Serial Computing spread across 8 nodes with Dual 6 core Intel ® Xeon ® X5670 @ 2.93 GHz CPU & 48GB RAM per node (96 Processing cores). It has a 11TB SAN Storage.UNAST info page

3.4 Servers

Several servers are configured for serving enterprise based services. They are as follows -

3.4.1 IBM Server - OpenPower 720 Server

Hardware Overview : 2 - way Power RISC Processor@1.5 GHz with 8 GB DDR SRRAM RAM and 73GB Storage Facility .

3.4.2 DHCP server

DHCP server is build on top of Windows Server 2008 (Standard Edition) and is configured to handle class B network (65534 hosts). Except servers, computation clusters, and network printers (they are configured with static IPs), the server provides IPs to all other network hosts including workstations (PCs, laptops) and mobile devices. For the wireless access points it provides Media Access Control (MAC) based address binding for authentication and lifetime lease of IP address.

3.4.3 DNS server

A DNS server is configured for name based access of services. DNS server is configured on top of CentOS using BIND server. Subdomains are configured with DNS.

3.4.4 Web server

CSC configured 2 Web servers for hosting centre’s website and other web based applications (e.g. Admission, Conference registrations). Web servers are built on top of CentOS. Servers are configured to server PHP, J2EE based applications. They are built on highly secure and highly available environment.

3.4.5 Email server

CSC has its own Linux based email server built on highly secure and highly available environment. It has its own spam filtering and other security mechanism. It handles thousands of emails daily.

3.4.6 Intranet server

CSC configured one intranet server to facilitate various intranet services. The server is configured to support PHP, Java, Python applications. Applications like Internal document archive (forms, notices, office orders), General notice board, Hall booking, Complaint tracking, Student’s profile builder are installed in intranet server.

3.4.7 Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Multiple VPN services are available for various needs.

3.4.8 Antivirus servers

Computer Center has 100 user Symantec Endpoint protection 12.1 Licence server which is valid for 3 years up to September 25, 2015. Supported platforms are Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

3.5 Softwares Servers

Computer Center has 1 software server server built using windows server 2008 standard platform which consist of MATLAB(10 USER),SIGMAPLOT(5 USER),ORIGIN(5 USER Concurrent Network Licence).

Computer Center has 1 software server server built in Centos5.6 which consist of MATHEMATICA 12(latest version)(20 USER Concurrent Network Licence.)

Computer Center has 10 User Concurrent Network Licence of LabView and ENVI+ IDL Software.

MATLAB and MATHEMATICA is supported in WINDOWS and LINUX Platform.

ORIGIN and SIGMAPLOT is supported to WINDOWS Platform.

4. Contacts

Email:
NEW