HRI      An Aided Institute of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India

Facilities at HRI

Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) is located in a residential campus on the outskirts of Prayagraj (Allahabad). The HRI library is among the best in the country. The Institute has a good computer network, with a fast connection to the Internet.

Campus

The HRI campus is about 66 acres in area, and is situated along the banks of the Ganga, 13 kms. from the centre of Prayagraj (Allahabad). It contains, in addition to the main Institute buildings, residential quarters for almost all the academic members of HRI, and several members of the administration. There is also a Guest House for visitors. The Institute operates a regular bus service between the city and the campus.

Much of the campus is densely wooded, and is home to several species of birds, and to wild animals such as foxes and jackals.

Library

The HRI library contains one of the best collections in the country, in the fields of mathematics and physics. It currently houses over 30,000 documents, and subscribes to about 200 journals.

The library is open on almost all days of the year, from 08:00 to 02:00. Much of the library's operations are automated, and electronic access to several journals is available. The library is avaliable online to users in the HRI network.

Computing

The HRI computer network consists of several workstations for special computing, in addition to desktop computers for all users.

The core of the network is the Computer Centre, which houses various servers, workstations, and several desktop computers for general use. File and authentication services are exported from the Computer Centre to a large chunk of the network through NFS and NIS. Apart from the NFS and NIS clients, some users have independent machines that are not clients of the central servers.

The common operating systems used at HRI are Unix clones like GNU/Linux, and Unix-like operating systems such as OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Most software packages, proprietary and open source, that are necessary for research in mathematics and physics, are either already available, or are acquired whenever a member of the Institute requests for it.

The network is connected to the Internet through two independent ISPs. The Institute regularly augments the available bandwidth, as more people join the Institute, and as the network grows.

High Performanace Computing

The High Performance Computing (HPC) facility at HRI Prayagraj (Allahabad) is intended to meet the high end computational needs of researchers in the areas of astrophysics, condensed matter, particle physics, and quantum information. In addition to researchers at HRI the HPC resource is available to collaborators outside HRI and also, to a limited extent, to researchers in other institutes.

The HPC facility has 4 serial/distributed memory clusters and 1 QDR parallel cluster with about 100 TB of associate storage. Two additional clusters will be set up during the XII plan period and associated networking and storage facilities enhanced accordingly.