Gandhinagar: Param Ananta, a state-of the art supercomputer, was commissioned at the IIT, Gandhinagar as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), today.
The Supercomputing facility was set up at the institute under 2nd of the NSM, where in 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 Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC), in line with the Make in India initiative.
The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, high memory nodes, high throughput storage and high performance Infiniband interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
Param Ananta 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, computational fluid dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers at the IIT Gandhinagar.
A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM. Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this Supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.
Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating on indigenous developed software stack.
Group Coordinator & Scientist, MeitY, Sunita Verma, officiating Director of IIT, Gandhinagar, Amit Prashant and Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune, AK Nath were prominent among those spoke on the occasion.
