Introduction:

R&D CU Abbottabad is a group of enthusiastic and energetic professionals who have expertise in the areas of High Performance Computing and various domains of Open Source technologies. R&D has been working to make available to the institute the latest technologies and world standard methodologies.

Expertise:

Department of Research and Development at CU Abbottabad is proud to have expertise in a variety of areas, which range from HPC, various OpenSource technologies, developing and administering heterogeneous Networks, Network Security to administrating and running the most popular Operating Systems used at all levels world wide. Key features are as follows.

• OSs

Professionals at R&D have administration level expertise in the following leading Operating Systems used in commercial and academic environments through-out the world.

Linux

• RHEL, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Trustix, IPCop, Ubuntu, Gentoo etc.

Unix

• F-BSD, Solaris, Net-BSD

• Security

• Penetration testing

• Intrusion detection systems

• VIRII patching

• VPN

• DMZ

• Firewalls

Projects:

High Performance Computation:

The field of high performance computing (HPC) comprises of computing applications on (parallel) supercomputers and Beowulf clusters. The Projects carried out by R&D in the area of HPC are listed below.

• Building and Administration of a General Purpose/Dedicated Academic Cluster

This general purpose R&D cluster is a powerful and prolific resource which offers our students a hands-on platform for learning, developing, debugging and running their highly compute intensive application.

• Building and Administration of Bio-informatics Cluster

This commercial strength cluster is an excellent computational resource with auto load balancer which helps research scholars and professionals to solve practical problems in the domain of bio-informatics.

• Visualization Cluster

The cluster developed for distributed processing and rendering is ideally suited for the needs of researchers dealing with high resolution image processing, rendering and visualization.

• Single System Image Cluster

This Single System Image Cluster is another state of the art computational technology that is made available for research scholars & students on the campus, capable of load-balancing of applications on heterogeneous hardware.

• Building and Administration of Super Sparc Cluster

R&D’s super-sparc cluster is a Sun Microsystems resource built, run and managed by R&D, used by our departments of Electrical engineering and environmental sciences. This resource based on powerful Sun systems provides an edge of using 64-bit architecture and bringing the strong realm of Sun Microsystems technologies to the students, in accordance with our belief of exposing our valued students to versatile computing environments.

Miscellaneous:

• VOIP

VOIP is a category of hardware and software that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. Voice data is sent in packets using rather than by traditional POTS circuits. One advantage of VOIP is that the telephone calls over the Internet do not incur a surcharge beyond what the user is paying for Internet access, much in the same way that the user doesn't pay for sending individual e-mails over the Internet.

Our Voice Over IP solution is best suited for environments like call centers, off-shore back/front offices etc, i.e. it can handle hundreds of lines, connected to local PSTN and allow users to make domestic as well as international calls (done with PTA's license).

Areas/Services provided by us:

• Soft PABXs
• Call Centers
• Trunk termination
• Video-OIP, Fax-OIP etc.

• Thin Clients (Wired / Wireless)

Thin Client is a computer, (client) only with a screen, keyboard, a pointing device and enough computers to handle display and communications in client-server architecture networks, which depends primarily on the central server for processing activities. This solution is successfully deployed in three major departments at CU Abbottabad.

Advantages of thin clients over thick clients:

• Lower IT admin costs - Easier to Secure
• Lower hardware costs - Worthless to most thieves
• Low energy consumption - Less network bandwidth

• Developing thin clients for the following platforms have been mastered by our R&D department.
• NX
• X
• RDP
• VNC

• GIS

R&D at Abbottabad is also collaborating with environmental sciences department to develop a GIS computational infrastructure. R&D’s role is to make available open source Geo Spatial databases accompanied by open source projects which allows our environmental science department to work on cutting edge computational solutions.

• Video Walls

A video wall is a large array of several monitors, placed close to one another in the shape of a video screen or "wall", each monitor is fed only part of the original video image. The Visualization cluster developed at CU Abbottabad is a commercial strength solution which offers support for visualization of enormously large images e.g GIS imagery, Satellite images. R&D has expertise of developing and managing Video walls of considerably any size.

• Gateways

R&D at CU has achieved expertise in the following areas in the field of networks, mainly working with networks of heterogeneous (h/w, s/w) nature.

• Firewalls

• Routing

• Bridging
  

• Custom build OS
  

• Embedded Systems
  

• Mail Servers
  

• Web Servers
  

• Fail / Safe Servers

Research articles/tutorial:

R&D has published various research articles in the different areas of science and management. A few are mentioned below followed by the link to R&D.

1. Evaluation of load balancing strategies.

2. Comparative evaluation of PVM and MPI on network of workstations (NOWs).

3. Sustainable Quality in downstream Supply-chain using Fuzzy Logic.

For tutorials, please visit

http://rnd.ciit.net.pk/tutorials.html

Contact us:

Please do not hesitate to contact us on rnd@ciit.net.pk if you have any queries or we can be of any help to you.