The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, Karnataka has installed and commissioned ‘Param Pravega’, one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
- The system has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1,015 operations per second).
About Param Pravega:
i.The Param Pravega system is a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the Central Processing Unit (CPU) nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) nodes that has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
ii.A majority of the components have been manufactured and assembled within India, and also an indigenous software stack has been developed by C-DAC.
- The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second).
- The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.
Note – In 2015, IISc procured and installed SahasraT, a cutting-edge supercomputing facility.
About National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):
i.The NSM is guided jointly by the department of science and technology (DST) and ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), and implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
ii.The Mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems until now at IISc, Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, The Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI)-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.
- These supercomputing systems are helpful in carrying out major Research & Development (R&D) activities, developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, establishing flood warning and prediction systems, and optimising telecom networks.
Recent related news:
4 Indian Institutes have made it to the Times Higher Education (THE)’s World Reputation Rankings 2021, the annual ranking of THE that features the top 200 universities based on the votes from leading academics across the globe. IISc bengaluru ranked 91 among Indian Institutes.
About Indian Institute of Science (IISc):
Establishment – 1909
Location – Bengaluru, Karnataka
Director – Govindan Rangarajan
