Petascale supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” established at IIT Roorkee

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) has deployed PARAM Ganga, a supercomputer at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 petaflops.

The availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering with a focus to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.

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, which is a step towards the Make in India initiative of the government.

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), which is being steered jointly by ministry of electronics and information technology (MeiTY) and the department of science and technology (DST) and implemented by centre for development of advanced computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has progressed significantly. The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realise the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.

The mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 petaflops. Till now C-DAC has deployed 11 systems at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC under NSM Phase-1 and Phase-2 with a cumulative compute power of more than 20 petaflops. A total of 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3,600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date. 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.

Under the build approach, 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 computer server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.

This national supercomputing facility was inaugurated by BVR Mohan Reddy, chairman, board of governors, IIT Roorkee in the presence of AK Chaturvedi, director, IIT Roorkee; Hemant Darbari, mission director, NSM; Naveen Kumar, scientist D, NSM programme division, MeitY; Manoranjan Parida, deputy director, IIT Roorkee; S A Kumar, Advisor NSM; Sanjay Wandhekar, senior director, C-DAC, Pune and convener- NSM expert group on infrastructure; Sivaji Chadaram, scientist – F, DST, along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC.