“High Performance Computer Cluster” by Dr.Ranjit Thapa, SRM Research Institute

Date: November 22, 2017

Dr. Ranjit Thapa, Associate Professor from SRM Research Institute, SRM University in his lecture on 22nd November 2017 introduces the development and need of supercomputers. He explained how the supercomputers are different from a general-purpose computer in respect of computational capacity. He explained how the scientific problems in different length scale and time scale can be solved via simulation in the computer clusters. He introduces how we can do simulation for energy management system for Hydrogen train and also how we can predict the behaviour of electron and atoms inside the materials. Shortly, in current date simulations can provide a fast way to screen the suitable materials and predict the performance of devices in a cost-effective way. SRM University has set up a supercomputer center equipped with servers contain 1870 cores and 16 TB of RAM to execute and solve the scientific problems (http://mysrm.srmuniv.ac.in/hpcc/). He also explained that in the emerging field of knowledge (data) based discovery of materials; the descriptor based approach has proven to be quite powerful in the design of new materials as well as obtaining insights into the chemical mechanisms. Within first-principles density functional theory, his group proposes new electronic structure based descriptor defined as a simple function of (i) the pz occupancy (considering occupied sates) and (ii) the contribution to the density of states at the Fermi Level from pz orbital of an active site of doped graphene. Lastly, he concluded with the note that “there are lots of job opportunities in the area of supercomputers and scientific computing and it is open for every student”.