PARAM GANGA

Made In India Petascale Supercomputer Installed at IIT Roorkee

Under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee (IIT-Roorkee) has deployed Param Ganga, a Made in India Petascale Supercomputer. It has a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 petaflops (a measure of a computer’s processing speed). One petaflop equals quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) or a thousand teraflops. The focus is to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.

The system was designed and commissioned by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), under the second phase of the NSM. NSM is being run jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc) are the agencies in charge of implementation. NSM has three phases. Phase I included assembling supercomputers, Phase II was manufacturing certain components within the country, and Phase III is indigenously developing a supercomputer. C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem. It developed the compute server Rudra, and high-speed interconnect Trinetra, which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers. IIT Roorkee had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the CDAC earlier to establish a state-of-the-art Supercomputing facility involving critical components such as motherboards for servers, direct contact liquid cooling data centres are manufactured in India progressing towards the Government of India initiative of “Atmanirbhar Bharat.”

C-DAC has been entrusted the responsibility for design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems under the build approach of Mission. 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. 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. Total 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3,600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date.

Last month, IISc set up one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers and the largest in an Indian academic institution. The supercomputer, called Param Pravega, is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits. It has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops. Like Param Ganga, C-DAC designed the supercomputer.

The basic idea behind building a Petascale Supercomputer with manufactured in India components is to lead the path towards Aatmanirbhar Bharat and accelerate the problem-solving capacity in multidisciplinary domains simultaneously. To this effect, “PARAM Ganga”, the new high-performance computational (HPC) facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance. The new HPC infrastructure will serve as an essential compute environment for the modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work.