National Supercomputing Mission: Supercomputer 'PARAM ANANTA' With 838 TeraFlops Capacity Commissioned At IIT Gandhinagar

A state-of-the-art supercomputer, PARAM ANANTA, with 838 TeraFlops supercomputing capability has been commissioned at IIT Gandhinagar under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) on Monday (30 May).

The supercomputing facility was dedicated to the nation by Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator and Scientist 'G', Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

PARAM ANANTA supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said in a release.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Gandhinagar and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on 12 October 2020 to establish this 838 TeraFlops supercomputing facility under NSM.

The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High memory nodes, high throughput storage and high performance Infiniband interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

PARAM ANANTA system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.

Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

PARAM ANANTA Supercomputing Facility will be of great benefit to IIT Gandhinagar to pursue the Research and Development (R&D) activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology at the Institute, including, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); Bio-engineering for Genome Sequencing and DNA studies; Computational Biology and Bioinformatics used in prediction and detection of gene networks; Atomic & Molecular Sciences that helps in understanding how a drug binds to a particular protein; Climate Change and Environment studies for extreme weather predictions and simulation of models which can predict the onset of a cyclone etc., the ministry said.

It will also help in R&D in Energy studies which will help in carrying out design simulation and optimization of energy conversion devices at various scales; Fire Dynamics Simulation; Nanotechnology; Robotics; Applied mathematics; Astronomy and Astrophysics; Material Sciences; Quantum Mechanics; Studies on Civil Engineering and structural mechanics to understand the dynamic behaviour of buildings, bridges; and complex structure.

A portion of the total compute power will also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM.

Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries.

Overall, this Supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem, the ministry said.

Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating on indigenously developed software stack, it added.