North Eastern Hill University gets `Param Sheersh' supercomputer
06 Jan 2009
A supercomputing facility called `Param Sheersh' has been inaugurated at the ongoing Indian Science Congress at the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong.
The new facility would benefit the students and teachers engaged in various research activities on the campus, said MGK Menon, chancellor of NEHU, while inaugurating the facility.
The `Param Sheersh' computer system is developed by C-DAC and is funded by the department of information technology of the ministry of communications and information technology, a government press release said.
This high performance computing facility aims at conducting research in strategic areas of weather, seismic, bio-informatics, physics, computational fluid dynamics, material sciences and life sciences.
The facility shall also serve as a core backbone platform for the students, researchers and faculty members of the region to develop competing skills for solving challenging problems requiring massive computational work, especially in the areas of physics, chemistry, mathematics, bio-informatics, botany, zoology and environmental science.
''Open source HPC applications like WRF, MM5, MOM4, ROMS, COSMOS under climatology, Quantum espresso, Abhinit under physics domain, mpiBLAST, ClustalW under bio-informatics shall be ported on the systems for conducting research,'' the release said.
The computer centre of the North- Eastern Hill University came into existence in May 1987. Since then the centre has been assisting students, research scholars, faculty members and administrative personnel of the university in studies, research, training, and computer application in a variety of fields.
The computer centre also conducts regular short duration computer courses for the entire student population of Meghalaya. The centre has collaboration with Indira Gandhi National Open University in conducting their various computer courses.
NEHU, based in Shillong, has been recognised a `university with potential for excellence.' It is one of the nine universities to be awarded the status. Its chosen thrust areas under the programme are area studies and biosciences.
NEHU was established in 1973 by an Act of Parliament ''to disseminate and advance knowledge by providing instructional and research facilities in such branches of learning as it may deem fit; to pay special attention to the improvement of the social and economic conditions and welfare of the people of the hill areas of North-East Region, and, in particular their intellectual, academic and cultural advancement".
The university has another campus located at Tura, also in Meghalaya. The University is one of six scheduled Universities that can affiliate any minority educational institution in the country.
Currently the university has 31 post-graduate departments, 5 centres of studies, including a rural development and agricultural planning post-graduate department. Eight departments have received special funds from the department of science and technology. The department of botany is the only centre of advanced studies in the region. At present 2,764 students are pursuing post graduate courses, professional courses and research in the university.
