Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” established at IIT Roorkee
- It is being developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
- The objective is to boost availability of supercomputers to accelerate R & D activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering.
Other Institutions involved in National Supercomputing Mission
- Steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
- Implemented by Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
- 4 major pillars of the NSM:
- Infrastructure
- Applications
- R&D
- HRD
Entrusted Institution for Major responsibilities
- C-DAC has been entrusted with the responsibility to design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems.
- The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.
- C-DAC has already deployed 11 systems at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali under NSM Phase-1 and Phase-2 with a cumulative compute power of more than 20 Petaflops.
- Total 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date.
- C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem in a phased manner, leading to indigenously designed and manufactured supercomputers.
- It has designed and developed a computer server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.
Some large scale applications being developed under NSM
- NSM Platform for Genomics and Drug Discovery.
- Urban Modeling: Science Based Decision Support Framework to Address Urban Environment Issues (Meteorology, Hydrology, Air Quality).
- Flood Early Warning and Prediction System for River Basins of India.
- HPC Software Suite for Seismic Imaging to aid Oil and Gas Exploration.
- MPPLAB: Telecom Network Optimization.
PARAM Ganga: a supercomputer
- It has a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.
- The system is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM.
- Substantial components utilized to build this system are manufactured and assembled within India along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC.
- It will provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighboring academic institutions.
Conclusion
- Making components and required equipment is a step towards the Make in India initiative of the Government.
- Availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering.