IISc installs ‘Param Pravega’ under National Supercomputing Mission
The system, which is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits, has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops. It is designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
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IISC Bengaluru. (File)Under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has installed and commissioned ‘Param Pravega’, claimed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country and the largest in an Indian academic institution.
The system, which is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits, has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (measure of a computer’s processing speed; 1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1,015 operations per second). It is designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Most of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
The NSM is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implemented by the C-DAC and the IISc. The mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc, Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT), Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI)-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.
“About 31,00,000 computational jobs have successfully been carried out by around 2,600 researchers across the country to date. These systems have greatly helped faculty members and students carry out major R&D activities, including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, establishing flood warning and prediction systems, and optimising telecom networks,” the IISc said in a statement.
The IISc already has a cutting-edge supercomputing facility established several years ago. In 2015, the institute procured and installed SahasraT, which was at that time the fastest supercomputer in the country. Faculty members and students have been using this facility to carry out research in various impactful and socially-relevant areas. These include research on Covid-19 and other infectious diseases, such as modelling viral entry and binding, studying interactions of proteins in bacterial and viral diseases, and designing new molecules with antibacterial and antiviral properties.
Researchers have also used the facility to simulate turbulent flows for green energy technologies, study climate change and associated impacts, analyse aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles, and many other research activities.
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