Summary
The high-performance supercomputer is expected to aid researchers in solving large-scale problems of different fields of science and engineering
The petascale supercomputer has been developed under an initiative of the National Supercomputing Mission
PARAM Shakti, a petascale supercomputer, was recently inaugurated by West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of the Union ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) and the department of science and technology (DST).
The supercomputer was inaugurated in the presence of V K Tewari, director, IIT Kharagpur; Sivaji Chadaram, director, DST; A.K Nath, director general and executive director, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC); Amit Patra, deputy director, IIT Kharagpur; Arvind Kumar, group coordinator, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; S A Kumar, advisor NSM, MeitY, along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC.
PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighbouring academic and research and development institutes.
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this supercomputing facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs. This facility has pioneered in using RDHX based efficient cooling system to obtain a high power usage effectiveness. This system has been tested extensively by both IIT Kharagpur and CDAC for commercial, open-source and in-house software pertaining to diversified applications.
IIT Kharagpur has been following the mandate of NSM towards development of computationally efficient software for supercomputing platforms and applications for large-scale industrial and scientific problems.
IIT Kharagpur has established the Centre for Computational and Data Science with a mandate to train the researchers in supercomputer accelerated R&D. The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering.
Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing-based research will be of great value addition are Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials etc.
NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this supercomputing facility involving researchers from IIT Kharagpur and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this supercomputing facility is expected to provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.
Last updated on 28 Mar 2022
