New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday dedicated to the nation supercomputer Param Porul which will provide value addition for researchers working in areas like weather and climate, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, material sciences, and computational fluid dynamics, according to an official release.
The state-of-the-art facility at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, has been established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology.
“The supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem,” said an official. The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, high throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband interconnect to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications, said officials.
“Majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by Centre for Development in Advanced Computing, in line with the Make in India initiative,” said an official. The supercomputer is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain high-power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
NIT, Tiruchirappalli had been carrying out research in the areas like health, agriculture, weather, and financial services. The facility installed under NSM will strengthen this research and the new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems in different fields, said officials. A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM, which has sponsored a number of applied research projects using the supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries.
A Memorandum of Understanding for the project was signed between NIT, Tiruchirappalli, and (C-DAC) on October 12, 2020, to establish the 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility under NSM. Under NSM, 15 such supercomputers have been installed across the nation with a computing capacity of 24 petaflops. All the supercomputers have been manufactured in India and are operating with an indigenously developed software stack, officials added.
Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Dr. Rajendra Kumar said his department is working with other ministries to extend the use of technology to facilitate them with an understanding of specific domains like agriculture, education, and healthcare with a problem-solving approach in a team effort by utilizing knowledge of academicians.
