NEW DELHI: Just days after installing one of the most powerful supercomputers, Param Pravega, the Centre is gearing up to set up nine more such facilities to boost fast-computing infrastructure in the country.
“India is fast evolving as a front-runner in high-power computing with National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) with supercomputing infrastructure already installed in 10 premier institutions like IITs, IISc, IISER-Pune, JNCASR-Bengaluru, various Centres for Development of Advanced Computing, NABI-Mohali, and benefitting researchers from several other institutions too. The final stage installation work is being carried out in five more institutions,” said a statement from the department of science and technology.
The upcoming nine new supercomputers will be installed at IIT-Bombay, IIT-Madras, IIT-Patna, IIT-Delhi, Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) Delhi, CDAC Pune, S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) Pune, and National Informatics Centre (NIC) Delhi, it said.
As part of NSM, IISc-Bengaluru has recently installed Param Pravega. With a supercomputing power of 3.3 petaflops, it is the largest supercomputer that has been installed in an Indian academic institution.
The NSM was launched to enhance research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting such centres to form a supercomputing grid with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone. Part of this is being imported from abroad, and part built indigenously, the latter being increased with time. This mission is being jointly steered by DST and ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) and implemented by C-DAC-Pune and IISc-Bengaluru.
The mission will provide access to high-performance computing (HPC) facilities to 100 several institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through NKN. The infrastructure will not only help meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and start-ups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics, and drug discovery, but also firm up indigenous capability of developing supercomputers.
PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur, IISER-Pune, JNCASR-Bengaluru and IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Hyderabad, NABI-Mohali, CDAC-Bengaluru, respectively.
PARAM Siddhi-AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence supercomputer, has achieved a global ranking of 62 in TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, which was released on November 16, 2020. The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 11,000 HPC-aware manpower and faculties.