Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” Established at IIT Roorkee Under National Supercomputing Mission

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) and implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has progressed significantly. The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realize the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.

C-DAC has been entrusted the responsibility to design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems under the build approach of Mission. The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops. Till now C-DAC has deployed 11 systems at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC under NSM Phase-1 and Phase-2 with a cumulative compute power of more than 20 Petaflops. Total 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date. The supercomputer infrastructure installed at various Institutes across the country have helped the R&D community to achieve major milestones, objectives and products for scientific and societal applications.

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.

Some of the large-scale applications which are being developed under NSM include the following.

• NSM Platform for Genomics and Drug Discovery.
• Urban Modelling: Science Based Decision Support Framework to Address Urban Environment Issues (Meteorology, Hydrology, Air Quality).
• Flood Early Warning and Prediction System for River Basins of India.
• HPC Software Suite for Seismic Imaging to aid Oil and Gas Exploration.
• MPPLAB: Telecom Network Optimization.

As part of its tireless journey of success, NSM has now deployed “PARAM Ganga”, a supercomputer at IIT Roorkee, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops. The system is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM. Substantial components utilized 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. 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. This national Supercomputing Facility was inaugurated on March 07, 2022 by Shri B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Roorkee in gracious presence of Prof A K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, Dr Hemant Darbari, Mission Director, NSM, Shri Naveen Kumar, Scientist D, NSM Program Division, MeitY, Prof Manoranjan Parida, Deputy Director, IIT Roorkee, Shri S A Kumar, Advisor NSM, Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director, C-DAC, Pune and Convener- NSM Expert Group on Infrastructure, Dr Sivaji Chadaram, Scientist – F, DST along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC.