NSM installs petascale supercomputer at IIT Roorkee

Pune: A petascale supercomputer, Param Ganga, has been established at IIT Roorkee as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The system, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops was designed and commissioned by the C-DAC (Centre for development of advanced computing) 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, as part of the Make in India initiative of the government. The supercomputer would accelerate R&D in multi-disciplinary domains of science and engineering, it said.

As of now, C-DAC has deployed 11 such systems at institutes across India under Phase1 and 2 of the NSM with cumulative compute power of over 20 petaflops, said the ministry. Further, a total of 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date.

The NSM, which was announced in 2015 aims to build and deploy 24 facilities with a cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.

The supercomputer infrastructure installed at various Institutes across the country have helped the R&D community to achieve major milestones, objectives and products for scientific and societal applications. C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem in a phased manner, which is leading to indigenously designed and manufactured supercomputers. It has designed and developed a compute server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.

Some of the large-scale applications which are being developed under the NSM include a platform for genomics and drug discovery, urban modelling, early flood warning and prediction systems for the river basins of India and a high-performance computing software suite for seismic imaging for oil and gas exploration.

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