About the center :

The Computer & Communication Centre is solely responsible for keeping the Electronic Communication &

Computation related facilities available to each and every member of IIT Guwahati. The services provided
by the Computer  & Communication Centre includes:

  • Installation & Maintenance of Servers for:
    • Internet Access.
    • E-mailing Facilities.
    • Computation Facilities.
  • Management & upkeep of the Official IITG & Intranet Web Page.
  • Management of the institute telephone exchange.
  • Management of the Centralized Computer Lab accessible to all the students of the institute as well as to other local researchers/students.
  • Maintaining the huge campus network, consisting about 10,000 nodes.
  • Providing technical assistance to the Academic Institutes and Organizations in and around Guwahati.
  • Providing facilities to the Students who come from various academic institutes from all over the world for their Short-term Courses, Project Work, Summer Training etc.
  • Provides & maintains the PCs of the Faculty & Staff members.
  • Providing Office Automation services.

These facilities are constantly upgraded to meet the evolving standards of IT. The Computer & Communication Centre remains open for Seventeen hours(17) (8:00 AM to 12:00 AM) a day and the students visit the Centre for their routine computing tasks. Many departments use the facilities of the Computer & Communication Centre to conduct their practical classes & examinations.

The Computer & Communication Centre also manages the IITG LAN, IITG Telephone Exchange and provide support to the users. The campus LAN has been extended to all the hostels. The Network connectivity to the residences have been extended using ADSL technology. New hardware and software are procured on a regular basis so as to provide a state of the art computing facility to the IITG family. The resource of the centre is also availed by students/researchers of other institutions in and around Guwahati.

 

Infrastructure :

The Computer & Communication Centre  occupies one-half of the 'Central Library & Computer & Communication Centre' building. It is spread over four floors with an area of about 5,000 sq. meter. The ground floor houses the support division of the Centre, UPS room, institute telephone exchange & a BSNL telephone exchange. The first floor is the main laboratory of the Centre where more then 300 users can be accommodated. The second floor has the server rooms, a communication room and a seating place for staff. There is also a departmental server room in this floor, where all other departments can keep their Servers to avail the 24x7 service of the Centre. The third floor is reserved for conferences & seminars.

A Sixteen-node (16) Server Farm with 1.5 Tera-Byte of shared storage is used for the Storage & Computation needs of the Students as well as the Faculty members of all the departments. The Server Farm works in High Availability Load Balanced Cluster mode. This server farm is used for general-purpose computation. In order to meet the high-end computational needs a 136 CPU high performance compute cluster(HPCC) is available. Each node of the HPCC has 32GB main memory and the total storage space is 6 TB. The HPCC is also connected to the GARUDA grid with a 1 Gbps fibre link. GARUDA is a nation wide computational grid that interconnects the high-end research labs of the country.

Apart from these, multiple independent Servers are used for E-mail, Proxy, DNS & Web Services.

The PCs available in the lab are regularly upgraded (three years, on average) to the latest specification for best user experience & productivity.

All the academic departments, hostels, guest house, sports complex & medical complex are connected through OFC to the core switch in the communication room. Internet access is availed from multiple ISPs to provide better connectivity and make the system fault-tolerant. Internet facility has been extended to the institute quarters and guest house through ADSL.

Three 60KVA on-line remote monitored UPSs in N+N redundant mode ensure that the Centre get clean and uninterrupted power supply.

Being a Level-3 PoP (Point-of-Presence) for ERNET in this region, the CC looks after the routers/modems & also provides technical support to multiple organizations in the region.

The ERNET node at IIT Guwahati provides Internet connectivity to educational & research institutes of the region:

The list of users having leased line connectivity from ERNET PoP, Guwahati are:
  • IIT Guwahati , (1:1) 8 Mbps leased line
  • Tezpur University, Assam, (1:1) 2Mbps leased line
  • Assam Agricultural University,Guwahati [Veternary College]. (1:1) 2Mbps leased line  
  • Centre of Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), (1:1) 2Mbps leased line
  • Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh, (1:1) 2Mbps leased line

The ERNET node at IIT Guwahati is responsible for maintaining these leased circuits.
More about ERNET PoP

Activities :

The Computer & Communication Centre remains open for seventeen hours in a day and the students visit the Centre for their routine computing task. Besides the resources of the Computer Center is used by the departments to conduct their practical courses.

The CSE dept conducts their computer programming practical in the Centre for the first year Btech students, the Mechanical Engineering Dept uses the Centre for their engineering drawing practical, students of ECE dept. use the Centre resources to work on Matlab. Likewise all the other departments conduct some of their labs in the Centre.

The Computer & Communication Centre is also involved in developing software for in-house use. The Payroll package developed by the Centre is used comprehensively by the Accounts section, 'Academic information management software' developed by Centre is used by Academic section to maintain student records, a online E-notice Board System is maintained by the Centre for posting and viewing notices campus wide electronically, a web based Complain Management Information System is used by users to lodge complains online, to name a few.

Along with the institute's Internet website, the Centre also maintains the Intranet website. The Computer & Communication Centre imparts training to the staff members of the institute and orientation courses to the school teachers of the institute.

The Computer & Communication Centre conducts short term courses during vacations on the current topics of Information Technology. During the month of July 2003 the Centre conducted a training programme on “Web Enabled Application Development with Oracle 9i Application Server”. There were participants from all over the country.

IIT Guwahati is a Level III PoP(Point Of Presence) for ERNET(Education and Research Network) in this region. The necessary technical support to the ERNET users of the region is provided by the staff members of the Computer & Communication Centre. The Computer & Communication Centre also conducts training programme on system administration for the various ERNET users of the region.