The National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Tiruchirappalli recently unveiled the PARAM PORUL, a cutting-edge supercomputer built under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The majority of its components were manufactured and assembled domestically, in line with Make in India initiative. The software stack was also indigenously developed by C-DAC.
Key Features of PARAM PORUL
The PARAM PORUL system is fitted with a combination of Central Processing Unit (CPU) nodes, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) nodes, High Memory nodes, high-throughput storage and high-performance InfiniBand interconnect. This diversified configuration serves various scientific and engineering applications’ computing needs.
Uniquely, the system employs Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology. This increases power usage effectiveness while simultaneously reducing operational costs. Additionally, numerous applications from diverse scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, and Computational Fluid Dynamics have been installed to aid researchers.
About the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)
Launched in 2015, the NSM aims to expand research capacities across India by forming a supercomputing grid. This network’s backbone is the National Knowledge Network (NKN), designed to provide secure and reliable connectivity.
The mission adheres to the ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives, aiming to build and deploy 24 facilities with more than 64 Petaflops of cumulative compute power. A Petaflop is a measure of a supercomputer’s processing speed, representing a thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. The mission is headed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore manage its implementation.
NSM Phases and Planning
The NSM was structured into three phases. The first phase dealt with the assembly of supercomputers. The focus of Phase II shifted towards manufacturing specific components domestically. Phase III envisions designing a completely indigenous supercomputer.
Recent Progress under the National Supercomputing Mission
Under the NSM’s first two phases, fifteen systems outputting 22 Petaflops in total have been established at various respected institutions including IITs, C-DAC, NIT, JNCASR, and IISER. In March 2022, as part of Phase 2, NSM deployed the “PARAM Ganga” at IIT Roorkee, boasting a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.
Currently, the fastest supercomputer in India constructed under the NSM is PARAM Siddhi-AI with a capacity of 5.26 PF. Globally, Japan’s Fugaku holds the title for the fastest supercomputer.
