The Indian Institute of Science (IISC) in Bengaluru has commissioned one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, which has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second). Dubbed Param Pravega.

Being the largest supercomputer in an Indian academic institution, it has been commissioned under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) to power diverse research and educational pursuits from across the country. The NSM has so far established 10 supercomputer systems across India with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.

Most 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.

"About 31,00,000 computational jobs have successfully been carried out by around 2,600 researchers across the country to date. These systems have greatly helped faculty members and students carry out major R&D activities, including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, establishing flood warning and prediction systems, and optimising telecom networks,” the IISc said in a statement.

“The Param Pravega system at IISc 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. The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops. The software stack on top of the hardware is provided and supported by C-DAC. The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications,” IISc added.

“Faculty members and students have been using this facility to carry out research in various impactful and socially-relevant areas. These include research on Covid-19 and other infectious diseases, such as modelling viral entry and binding, studying interactions of proteins in bacterial and viral diseases, and designing new molecules with antibacterial and antiviral properties,” the statement read.

Researchers, IISc said, have also used the facility to simulate turbulent flows for green energy technologies, study climate change and associated impacts, analyse aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles, and many other research activities. “...These efforts are expected to ramp up significantly with Param Pravega,” IISc said.

Image courtesy: Times of India