Context
PARAM PORUL, a state-of-the-art Supercomputer and was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
Specifications
- PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the NSM with 838 Tera Flops Supercomputing Facility.
- The 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 C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
- PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
- Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, etc. have been installed.
Significance
- NIT is carrying out research in the areas of societal interest such as Health, Agriculture, Weather, and Financial Services. The facility installed under NSM will strengthen this research.
- The computer will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries.
- Under NSM, to date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with computer capacity of 24 petaflops.
- All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operate with an indigenously developed software stack.
What is the National Supercomputing Mission?
- The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- It is implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the IISc, Bengaluru.
- In 2015, the National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.
- The NKN project is aimed at establishing a strong and robust Indian network which will be capable of providing secure and reliable connectivity.
- A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.
- The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.
- Generally, PETAFLOP is a measure of a Supercomputer’s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
- It supports the government's vision of 'Digital India' and 'Make in India' initiatives.
- The mission was planned in three phases-
- Phase I looking at assembling supercomputers.
- Phase II looking at manufacturing certain components within the country.
- Phase III where a supercomputer is designed by India.
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Recent developments under National Supercomputing Mission
- Under Phase 1 & Phase 2, 15 systems with computer power of 22 Petaflops (PF) have been built at IIT’s, C-DAC, NIT, JNCASR, and IISER.
- NSM deployed “PARAM Ganga” at IIT Roorkee in March 2022 with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops as a part of phase 2.
- PARAM Siddhi-AI is the fastest supercomputer in India built under NSM with a capacity of 5.26 PF.
- Japan’s Fugaku is the world’s fastest supercomputer.
