BENGALURU: As part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) successfully commissioned and installed one of the most powerful Indian supercomputers. Param Pravega is the largest supercomputer that has been installed in an Indian academic institution.
NSM was launched in 2015 to empower India’s research and academic institutions by providing supercomputational capabilities like Param Pravega. It is spearheaded jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). One of the aims of the mission is to increase India’s total computational capacity to 16 petaflops. One petaflop equals around a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second.
Param Pravega contributes to that total capacity, having a supercomputing power of 3.3 petaflops, increasing the cumulative power to 17 petaflops. The supercomputer was designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), with a majority of the hardware and software being manufactured within the country itself. The supercomputer will be used for research and development projects at the institution. “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,” said a statement from the institution.
Previously, the institution was in possession of what at the time was the fastest supercomputer in India, the SaharaT, which was used for various research projects undertaken by the institute including Covid-19 research. “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. These efforts are expected to ramp up significantly with Param Pravega,” the statement said.