Ocean research in the country is all set to get a boost with the deployment of electronics and high computing IT solutions, thus joining the bandwagon of developed countries. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune will be facilitating high-end research to enhance quality adoption of high performance computing (HPC) in the field of oceanography. One of the core areas of C-DAC?s expertise includes HPC including scientific modeling and visualisation, executing real time oceanography and climatology applications.
While experts are pondering over climate change, expansion of deserts and warning of the earth which may have been caused by destruction of global environment, new researches point out that this may be due to an upset balance in heat and matters in the interactions between atmosphere and ocean. An ocean simulation model is perhaps the need of the hour.
Understanding this, C-DAC has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hyderabad-based Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) to collaborate in the areas of high performance computing for production grade environments. The objective is to provide C-DAC?s technological and professional services in HPC domain to INCOIS for a period of three years.
INCOIS is an autonomous institute under the ministry of earth sciences which provides ocean information and advisory services to the society, industry, government and scientific community through sustained ocean observations and constant improvement by means of systematic and focused research. Confluence of ocean science, ocean observing systems and IT is vital to the realisation of this mission.
At a core level, C-DAC and INCOIS intend to jointly accelerate R&D activities to address large scale challenges in the frontiers of oceanography. The strategic association will catalyse the usage and enhance quality adoption of high performance computing in field of oceanography, says Goldi Misra, Group coordinator and head, HPC Solutions Group, C-DAC.
Oceans control weather and climate and thus considerably influence the environment. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explosions (including detonations of underwater nuclear devices), landslides and other mass movements, meteorite ocean impacts or similar impact events and other disturbances above or below water all have the potential to generate a tsunami.
?C-DAC will facilitate INCOIS in the optimisation and parallelisation of models of this nature to make them capable for real-time predictions,??
Misra explains. Incidentally, INCOIS has established a tsunami early warning centre with the necessary computational and communication infrastructure that enables reception of real-time data from all the sensors, analysis of the data, generation and dissemination of tsunami advisories following a standard operating procedure.
A number of widely-used oceanographic application models such as ROMS, MOM and CUPOM are being used along with in-house developed systems to study and understand ocean and climate, coastal ocean, hazardous weather events, observations, ocean data assimilation.
Incidentally, C-DAC along with the ministry of earth sciences has been exploring the possibility of collaboration to look at problems faced in the weather and climate modeling. Recently, an agreement was signed between C-DAC and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida for implementation of Param supercomputing system for regional forecasts and mountain meteorology. A collaborative project by C-DAC and NCMRWF was initiated under this agreement to set up Param Padma supercomputer with C-DAC?s indigenously developed high speed low latency interconnect PARAMNet 2 based research facility for conducting studies in climate models. It would facilitate in indigenously developed hardware, operating environments, parallel ecosystems application specific predictive models in a cost-effective manner.
Continuing the association with the ministry along with its weather forecasting domain, C-DAC?s collaboration with INCOIS will help in upgradation of existing LAN/WAN infrastructure, advanced security audit, disaster recovery, designing and implementing the security policy for INCOIS and exploring usage of large scale system for solving challenge problems in oceans.