With the vision and aim to provide wealth of resources as well as multifaceted exposure to versatile technologies, R&D department made the Sun Lab available for the use of CIIT (ATD) faculty and staff.
This resource, developed under the support and guidance of Director CIIT Abbottabad, would serve in bringing the students/faculty a step closer to Open source technologies as well as cutting edge research rich environments of UNIX world.

The CIIT Sun Research Lab is immensely useful for people ranging from Mathematicians, computer engineers, Environmental Scientists, statisticians to computing scientist. It is hoped that no matter how meager or wealthy resources are, limits of innovations, scientific boundaries would still be pushed further.

R&D present the revamped Sun Microsystems lab for CIIT (ATD), which is accessible (GUI + CLI) throughout the campus, with following features;

Applications

• GNU apps
• Gnu GCC/C++, sun CC/++,
• Native Java
• Fortran
• Eclipse/JBuilder2005
• Star Office
• High Performance parallel Scilab

Seminar/presentations

1. Introduction to sunLab resources to faculty members.
2. Tutorial sessions at various Departments.
3. Upgradation of R&D website.
4. Services to ISP (Mail servers, DNS, restructuring of ISP setup in terms of security and network availability)
5. Optimization, congestion control, and efficient utilization of bandwidth.

Future plans

Numerous cutting edge technology projects are in the pipeline, both of academic excellence as well as of commercial significance.

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

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.

• 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.

• Bio-informatics Cluster

  This commercial strength cluster is an excellent High performance computational resource, which helps research scholars and professionals to solve practical problems in the domain of bio-informatics. Such an Gene Sequencing, Annotation, Marking and gene Analysis.

• 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.

• 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.

Research articles/tutorial

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

• Evaluation of load balancing strategies.
• Comparative evaluation of PVM and MPI on network of workstations.
• Sustainable Quality in downstream Supply-chain using Fuzzy Logic.
• Using Fuzzy Logic to Investigate and Improve Quality Diffusion among Less Resourceful Supply Links, Orlando, Florida (USA).
• Buyer-Supplier relationships in SMEs & Diffusion of Innovations - An exploratory study of SME quality improvement for global competitiveness.
• Using Fuzzy Logic to Investigate and Improve Quality Diffusion among Less Resourceful Supply Links
• Supplier Selection using Fuzzy Extended Analytic Hierarchy Process.
• Optimization of Probabilistic and decentralized load balancer on Single System Image.
• Students’ performance evaluation based on Fuzzy Logic.
• Improving on the OM auto-load balancer using Genetic Algorithms.