As per the recent news, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has installed a supercomputer named ‘Param Pravega’ under the aegis of the government’s National Supercomputing Mission. This installation adds to India’s existing achievements in the field of Science and Technology. Param Pravega boasts a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops, propelling India further into the domain of high-capacity computing.
Understanding Supercomputers
A supercomputer, in simple terms, is a computer that performs at or near the highest operational rate for computers. The processing speed of supercomputers is often measured using PETAFLOP, signifying a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. Floating point operations per second, or FLOPS, are a critical measure of a computer’s processor performance.
Supercomputers are designed to serve enterprises and organizations that necessitate immense computing power. A few notable usage examples include weather forecasting, scientific research, intelligence gathering, data mining, and more. On the global front, China houses the maximum number of supercomputers followed by the US, Japan, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
India’s Supercomputer Journey
India embarked on its supercomputer journey with the PARAM 8000, and fast-forward to today, the nation has several supercomputers to its credit. These include PARAM Shivay, which was indigenously assembled and installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, Brahma, Yukti, Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur, IISER Pune, JNCASR Bengaluru, and IIT Kanpur respectively. In 2020, another momentous achievement was recorded when the High-Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, PARAM Siddhi, secured the 62nd rank in the Top 500 most powerful supercomputer systems globally.
National Supercomputing Mission: A Brief Overview
Launched in 2015, the National Supercomputing Mission serves to bolster research capacities in India by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid. This grid leverages the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as its backbone, thereby creating a robust and secure Indian network capable of providing reliable connectivity.
The mission resonates with the government’s ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives and is jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). On the implementation front, it’s managed by Pune’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), and IISc Bengaluru.
The mission operates in three phases:
– Phase I: Assembly of supercomputers
– Phase II: Manufacturing certain components domestically
– Phase III: Designing a supercomputer entirely in India
As part of its indigenization efforts, a server platform named ‘Rudra’ is being evaluated in a pilot system with an interconnect for inter-node communication called Trinetra also under development.
