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HEMRL near Sutarwad. pic/subroto roy

HIGH Energy Materials Research Limited (HEMRL) a sensitive defence organisation has rejected the idea of setting up a WiFi network for internal communication and scientific computing. The decision was taken for security reasons and considering various explosive materials being handled on its 800-acre premises.

"We handle explosive materials like RDX, Aluminium Oxide, and other rocket propellants," said HEMRL Director Shubhananda Rao.

"The top brass, including the director and associate director Amarjit Singh, has been part of this decision," added Manish Bharadwaj, head of the computer group.

"But this is in keeping with Defence Research Development Organisation strictures not to allow mobile phones and WiFi within the campus because they may set off explosions or lead to data theft," said Bharadwaj. Instead HEMRL has installed an enormous wide LAN system.

The system was inaugurated on Wednesday scientist A Sivathanu Pillai on his two-day visit to the workshop.
The established network supports the convergence of data, video and voice requirements. It facilitates scientific data sharing, video surveillance, communication and collaboration across the 800 acre HEMRL campus.

"It saves a lot of government money because scientific computing software is rather costly and to install them on each work station would be prohibitive," Bharadwaj said.

Bharadwaj added that the new system will be paperless preventing loss or theft of sensitive internal files.
HEMRL has planned and implemented fiber optics based campus to provide network facility across the 65 work centres at Sutarwadi.

The workstations are connected using 43 km of optical fibre cable (OFC) and UTP Cat six cables. The network provides 10 Gbps (Giga bits per seconds) bandwidth on the backbone of the network and 1Gbps on the access switch/nodes.

The network can provides access to 650 (325x2) nodes. Campus Network has been designed using three tier architecture having core, distribution and access layers.