IISC installs one of India's most powerful supercomputers developed under NSM

Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has installed what is being touted as the most powerful supercomputer in the country. Commissioned as Param Pravega, the supercomputer is also the largest in an Indian academic institution and according to IISC, it is capable of performing 3.3 petaflops operations every second. Just one petaflop equals a quadrillion operations per second, as per the institution. 

"It has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). A 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 company said in its official report. 

Specifications of the supercomputer

Since it is among the most powerful supercomputers in India, the system, which has been developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), has some unmatched specifications. According to IISC, the Param Pravega system is a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes.

Moreover, the system has a comprehensive peak computing power of 3.3 petaflops driven by hardware consisting of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system. "The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications", the institution said in a statement. 

IISC informed that the NSM, under which the supercomputer has been developed, is implemented by C-DAC and IISc and is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). According to the institution, the deployment of as many as 10 supercomputers, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops, has been supported through this programme in institutions such as IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC.

It is worth noting that it was IIISC where the first supercomputer of India was procured and installed in 2015. Named SahasraT, the supercomputing facility has been used to carry out research in various impactful and socially-relevant areas including COVID-19. The facility has also been to develop green energy technologies, study climate change and associated impacts, and analyse aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles.

(Image: IISC)