Petascale Supercomputer PARAM Ganga Set Up At IIT Roorkee Under National Supercomputing Mission

A new supercomputer "PARAM Ganga" with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 petaflops has been deployed at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), which is being steered jointly by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), is being implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

C-DAC has been entrusted the responsibility to design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems under the build approach of Mission.

Under the build approach, C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem in a phased manner, which is leading to indigenously designed and manufactured supercomputers. It has designed and developed a compute server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.

The PARAM Ganga system, inaugurated on Monday (7 March) in IIT Roorkee, is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM.

Substantial components utilised to build this system are manufactured and assembled within India along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, which is a step towards the Make in India initiative of the government, the Ministry of Electronics and IT said in a statement on Tuesday (8 March).

Availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering with a focus to provide computational power to user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions, the ministry said.

Under the NSM, India plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.

According to the ministry, some of the large-scale applications which are being developed under NSM include the following:

• NSM Platform for Genomics and Drug Discovery.