Intelligent Affective Computing and Biometric Lab

Intelligent Affective Computing and Biometric Laboratory opens up a platform for wide range of interdisciplinary research in fields of Electrical Engineering, Cognitive Science and Biomedical Engineering. The laboratory facilities include Virtual Reality-based Programming Platform, namely, Vizard from WorldViz Inc. Vizard is a high level graphics toolkit for the development of high-performance graphics applications, scientific visualization, and games. The VR platform provides controlled and replicable experimental setups and allows manipulation of the environment that would be difficult or prohibitively expensive in the real world. Additionally, we have Wireless Physiology-based Data Acquisition System from Biopac Systems Inc. which is compatible with the Virtual Reality-based programming platform mentioned above. The Wireless Physiology-based Data Acquisition System facilitates the real time data acquisition of physiological signals, such as, heart beat, muscle twitching, sweating, skin temperature, etc. The wireless, wearable physiological monitoring device, noninvasively records high quality data and is the perfect tool for applications that demand greater degrees of subject freedom and advanced experimental design. Presently, we are using this device for biomedical applications, e.g., physiology-sensitive adaptive intelligent stroke rehabilitation and cognitive science applications, e.g., affective Human Computer Interaction for children with autism. We also have the facility of interacting with the computing world with the Eye Tracker from Arrington Inc. This allows to track real-time data of gaze, blinking, pupil dilation, etc. of the user. The analysis of parameters e.g., blinking, pupil dilation, fixations, etc. is significant for a variety of researches in areas of Biomedical engineering and Human Computer Interaction. While working with the virtual world human experience can be augmented by using Haptic Device. At our research lab we have the Haptic Device from SensAble Technologies which makes it possible for users to touch, feel and manipulate virtual objects. The tactile feedback provided by this device can be useful in biomedical applications.

High-performance Computing Laboratory

HPCLab@IITGN first started in 2011/2012 with the establishment of NODE-X, a hybrid multi-core and GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) platform for advancing research and teaching in computational science and engineering and for the promotion of the use of GPU accelerators and CUDA programming for HPC. NODE-X consists of seven networked workstations set up with partial support from IIT Gandhinagar, Fujitsu and Nvidia. The initial main compute engines of this system are the 2 Celsius R-670 workstations consisting of 24 CPU cores, 96 GB main system RAM (i.e. CPU cores) and 2 Terabytes of HDD Storage and 4 Nvidia Tesla C2070 GPU cards consisting a total of 1800 CUDA cores and 6GB GPU/Graphics RAM. The system runs on the Ubuntu Linux Operating System and the job scheduling is managed by an open source software Torque. The remaining 5 high-end workstations (each consisting of Nvidia Quadro 2000 cards, 1 GB memory with 1 TB storage,4 CPUs and 4GB RAM and 192 GPU cores ) form a computational design cluster of 20 CPU, 20GB RAM to facilitate high fidelity computational modeling and visualization of engineered systems.  In 2013, the cluster has been expanded to include another R-670 workstation and has 4 Tesla C2070, 2 CUDA- enabled GeForce GTX480s, 2 CUDA- enabled  GeForce GTX680s and 2 Kepler K20 GPU cards. These are widely used in the graduate level and a computer science minor course on Algorithms on Advanced Computer Architectures. In Feb 2013, IIT Gandhinagar was granted recognition as a Nvidia-CUDA Teaching Centre.  The entire facility is connected via network with a 8 TB NAS Unified Storage System. In 2014 the memory of the system has been upgraded to192 GB in view increased usage as this facility serves as a computational resource for the entire campus community. Several popular CAE softwares as well as open source softwares have been implemented on the system. NODE-X is connected to GARUDA– the Indian Grid and a MOU between CDAC Bangalore and IITGN. CDAC Pune has allotted a few accounts facilitating large scale scientific computing on the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) – Param Yuva at CDAC Pune. In conjunction with this, CD-Adapco has provided IITGN with unlimited licenses for Star-CCM+ multi-physics and CFD software licenses for enabling large scale scientific computations on NPSF. IITGN has also been appointed by CDAC as the Indian Grid Certification Authority for Ahmedabad. In a major HPC hardware upgrade in 2015, a new HPC System VEGA has been set up to meet the increasing demands of HPC on campus. VEGA is a high performance computing cluster (HPCC) of Fujitsu make with 8.8 TFlops (Peak) and 7.4 Tflops (sustained),  has one master node with Intel dual six-core processors, 48GB RAM and 8 compute nodes each with Intel dual eight-cores processor and 64GB RAM. Additionally, the cluster has two GPU nodes each with Intel eight-core and NVIDIA K20Xm Tesla cards with 2688 CUDA cores. The storage of the HPCC is equipped with Dual-Controller based SAN and has a usable capacity of 25TB that connects to the master node through I/O nodes. The internode communication takes place through the Infiniband backbone and Gigabyte Ethernet Switch. Many software packages ranging from gcc compilers to parallel computing software. For more information click here

Photonic Sensors Laboratory

The Photonic Sensors Laboratory conducts research in the area of physical and chemical sensing using photonic technologies. An area of current focus is tunable diode laser spectroscopy for real-time detection of hazardous gases and measurement of gas concentration, pressure and temperature. This activity has direct application in industrial process control, safety and clinical applications such as breathe analysis for non-invasive detection of biomarkers. The laboratory is equipped with narrow linewidth near-infrared laser diodes (1650nm from Toptica Photonics and 2004nm from Vertilas), thermoelecrtrically-cooled amplified photodetectors (Thorlabs), a 50MHz dual-phase digital lock-in amplifier (Zurich Instruments), a high-end arbitrary waveform generator (Agilent) and a 500MHz digital storage oscilloscope. The laboratory also has an assortment of telecom-grade laser diodes, photodetectors and optical fiber components.

Semiconductor Device Characterization Facility

The semiconductor device characterization facility has been established for detailed wafer-level characterization (I-V, C-V, pulse, noise and reliability measurements). This facility has the following equipment: a 6-inch wafer probe station with thermo chuck (Semiprobe), semiconductor parametric analyzer B1500 with 4 SMUs, 1 LCR meter, 1 pulse unit (Agilent), dynamic signal analyzer 35670A (Agilent), low-noise current preamplifier (Stanford Research Systems), ICCAP modelling software (Agilent), manual diamond scriber (ATV). This facility will be extensively used for semiconductor device/circuit research, semiconductor device modelling and electrical characterization of nanostructures.