Supercomputer Education Research Centre
The Computer Centre, established in 1970 as a central computing facility, became Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) in 1990 to provide state-of-the-art computing facility to the faculty and students of the Institute. The Centre is conceived of as a functionally distributed supercomputing environment, housing leading-edge computing systems, with sophisticated software packages, and connected by a powerful high-speed fibre-optic network. The computing facilities are connected to the campus LAN, WLAN and also to the Internet. The Centre was created to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee of the Institute, in the year 1984.
Ever since its inception, SERC has stimulated a rapid growth of computer-based research, development, and training at the Institute. The powerful campus wide network has created an enhanced awareness for network computing and information processing. The Centre has been acting as a referral agency for several governmental and non-governmental organizations in their pursuit for setting up computing centres to suit their user needs
Research: SERC is engaged in research programs in areas relating to supercomputer development and application. The active research areas are Bioinformatics, Computational Electromagnetics and Acoustics, Computer Aided VLSI Design, Computer Architecture, Compiler Optimizations, Database Systems, Graphics and Visualization, Grid Computing, Information and Network Security, Multimedia Systems, High Performance Computing, Numerical Algorithms, Operations Research, and System on Chip and Embedded Processor Architectures. The Centre is also involved in several sponsored research projects in collaboration with many government and private agencies. The clientele include different departments of the Government of India (Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Human Resources Development, Department of Electronics, Defense Research and Development Organization, Department of Biotechnology), Public and Private sector undertakings (Aeronautical Development Agency, Indian Space Research Organization), and multinationals (Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Lucky Goldstar, Philips Research, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments). Many of these exercises have fed critical inputs to various National Initiatives in High Performance Computing and Communication Technology.
Computational Facilities: SERC's objective is to meet a wide spectrum of computing requirements of the campus users. The Centre is thriving to provide excellent computing power, in terms of both hardware and software packages, to accommodate the needs of both science and engineering disciplines. In addition to meeting the demands in scientific computing, the Centre also provides the needed resource for symbolic computing and state-of-the-art graphics and visualization. The Centre's facilities are balanced to meet both the instructional and research program of the Institute. It accomplishes this through a variety of specialized heterogeneous machines which are homogenized by the network and system software.
Education: SERC offers PhD and M Sc(Engg) in all the research areas mentioned above. A masters degree programme MTech in Computational Science, one of the first of its kind in India, was started by SERC in 1999. This is an inter-disciplinary programme that brings together the domain specific knowledge of science and engineering and the relevant topics of computer science and mathematics.
SERC is located at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India