India has been striving for superiority in the realm of supercomputing. It recently achieved a breakthrough in this arena by installing a supercomputer with strong computing capability at IIT Roorkee. Recently, National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) installed PARAM Ganga, a High-Performance Computing (HPC) device with a processing capability of 1.66 petaflops at IIT Roorkee.
What is a supercomputer?
It is a machine that operates at or around the greatest operating rate currently available for computers. PETAFLOP is a measure of the processing speed of a Supercomputer and may be represented as 1,000 trillion floating point instructions every second.
FLOPS (floating point operations per second) are commonly used to assess a computer’s performance. Extremely lengthy quantities of data or information can be managed at a very high speed with floating-point encoding. Supercomputers are generally intended for usage in businesses and organisations that demand large amounts of computational power, such as Weather prediction, academic research, intelligence collection and analysis, data mining, etc.
China has the most supercomputers and continues to lead the world in this technological advancement race, followed by the United States and Japan. The PARAM 8000 was the first supercomputer in India. IIT (BHU) houses PARAM Shivay, the first indigenously built supercomputer.
PARAM Siddhi, the High-Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) device, was ranked 62nd in the world’s Top 500 most powerful high-performance computing machines in 2020.
Key pointers about the Supercomputer-PARAM GANGA
- It was created under the auspices of NSM by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
- In addition to paving the way for Aatmanirbhar Bharat, a Petascale Supercomputer with components made in India is intended to accelerate problem-solving capabilities across multiple fields.
- As a result, scholars will be able to address various challenging national and international issues.
- In addition to being a critical computing environment for research currently underway, it will also serve as an experimental and theoretical research environment.
- The goal is to provide computing capacity to the IIT Roorkee user base and adjacent educational establishments.
National Supercomputer Mission
It was created in 2015 to improve the country’s research abilities and capacity by linking them to create a Supercomputing network, with the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone. The NKN project aims to build a robust and resilient Indian network competent in offering secure and dependable connections.
The Mission intends to construct and implement 24 facilities with a total computational capability of more than 64 Petaflops. C-DAC has installed 11 high capabilities systems with a total computational power of more than 20 Petaflops.
The project was divided into three phases
- Phase I involved constructing or assembling supercomputers.
- Phase II involved producing specific elements within the nation.
- Phase III involves building the supercomputer indigenously.
- It reinforces the government’s “Digital India” and “Make in India” programmes. The Mission is co-managed by the Ministry of Electronics and the Department of Science and Technology (DST)
- It is being carried out by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.
