GARUDA is India’s national grid computing initiative, a Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) program funded by the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to deploy a distributed networked infrastructure for universities, research labs, industry and government throughout India.
Named after the winged mount of the Hindu god Vishnu, GARUDA currently connects 45 institutions in 17 cities to work on highly complex problems of national interest such as weather and climate modeling.
GARUDA is part of the National Knowledge Network (NKN), an initiative to build a high-speed national network backbone with reliable quality of service (QoS) and security. Currently, GARUDA connects approximately 65 teraflops of available computational resources with a data transfer rate (bandwidth) of 1 Gbps.
See also: distributed computing