Cusat sets up ‘Tejaswi’ hybrid supercomputing facility

Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) has come up with its ‘Tejaswi’ hybrid supercomputing facility designed to accelerate research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), scientific simulations, and high-performance computing at an investment of ₹26 crore.

The cutting-edge hybrid computing facility, established utilising assistance under the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB), will be inaugurated on October 27.

The project includes the establishment of traditional high performance computing (HPC) and a state-of-the-art AI compute infrastructure, featuring 102 computing server nodes, 9 GPU servers, 2-Petabyte parallel file system storage, and a high-performance network interconnect, said Santhosh Kumar. G, Professor, Department of Computer Science, and Director of the Centre for Information Resource Management.

The facility, which has been set up at the Computer Centre of the university, integrates traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities, delivering 350 TFLOPS (Tera Floating Point Operations per second) sustained performance, with modern AI/Machine Learning (ML) workloads. This hybrid approach ensures comprehensive capacity for scientific simulations, modelling, and data-intensive AI development, he said.

“Tejaswi”supports leading open source applications, including climate modelling (WRF, REGCM4), Computational Chemistry and Physics (GROMACS, VASP, Quantum Espresso). It will also generate physically realistic data points essential for AI training.

The facility is expected to provide powerful computational resources to boost advanced research across various faculties and to aid the varsity’s efforts to strengthen its research in emerging fields such as AI and machine learning. The authorities stated that it is specifically designed to cater to the development of computer-oriented initiatives launched by the State government.