‘India is fast evolving as a front runner in high power computing’

New Delhi: Ministry of Science & Technology on Tuesday said that the country is “fast evolving as a front runner in high power computing” with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM).

With Supercomputing infrastructure already installed in 10 premier institutions. The final stage installation work is being carried out in 5 more institutions, it added.

Further, according to the ministry, in the upcoming year, nine more supercomputers will be commissioned and installed in institutes like IIT-Bombay, IIT-Madras, IIT-Patna, IIT-Delhi, IUAC-Delhi, CDAC-Pune, SNBNCBS, NCRA Pune, and NIC Delhi.

The ministry said that it will help meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics, and drug discovery, but also firm up indigenous capability of developing supercomputers.

As part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has installed Param Pravega, one of the most powerful Indian supercomputers. Param Pravega having a supercomputing power of 3.3 petaflops, is the largest supercomputer that has been installed in an Indian academic institution.

Going ahead, design and development of indigenous server nodes, interconnect switch, storage, and system software stack for next generation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems has been initiated with 85 per cent indigenous manufacturing.

This includes India’s first indigenous server platform called ‘Rudra’, which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs as well as the strategic needs of the country.

A 200 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system created and installed in C-DAC can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads, increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times. PARAM Siddhi – AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, has achieved global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, released on November 16, 2020.

The NSM has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 11,000 HPC aware manpower and faculties.