The research wing of the ITSC facilitates research activities that require computation power. ITSC has its own High Performance Computing (HPC) facility and we are expanding the capabilities of the facility. The research wing is managed by Deputy Director/Research together with the research management committee of the ITSC.
High Performance Computing (HPC) Facility
Colombo High Performance Computing (HPC) Facility, supports the research at the Faculty of Science, University of Colombo. Researchers who find it difficult to perform computational activities in a standard workstation are invited to review the HPC policy and submit a proposal to the HPC management committee to obtain access to the HPC facility.
At the moment, Colombo HPC facility provides parallel data processing via CPUs and GPUs. Please check available software tools and system specifications.
From stock market analysis to cancer research, complexity of scientific problems has increased considerably in recent decades and high performance computing systems with powerful processors, networks and parallel supercomputers are used worldwide to tackle problems that are very computationally or data-intensive.
As the Faculty of Science celebrates its 100 years of excellence in science, the need for computational infrastructures to enhance the support to scientific research was identified. The Faculty of Science, University of Colombo received a LKR 100 million grant under the Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) scheme which is a World Bank funded Sri Lankan government operation to support the higher education sector. Accordingly a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility was established with the funds received through the AHEAD ELTA-ELSE grant. The facility aims at enhancing computer-based learning, teaching, assessment and research among the undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Faculty of Science by providing them wide access to advanced computing facilities and shared resources. In addition, the facility will open up and promote collaborative works among national and international research groups. The facility allows the researchers to tackle scientific problems which are computationally expensive such as molecular dynamics simulations, Monte Carlo simulations, quantum mechanical calculations, advanced materials modeling, machine learning, data science and bioinformatics.
The HPC facility offer a range of services including:
- maintaining advanced computation facilities within Faculty of Science, University of Colombo
- help with scientific research applications (access to research software, software porting and optimisation, specialist software development, research portals)
- managing users (internal, external and affiliates)
- organizing training programs/workshops (e.g. for new researchers or research assistants).