PARAM PORUL, a state-of the art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), was recently inaugurated. PARAM PORUL 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.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between NIT Tiruchirappalli and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on 12th 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 PORUL 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. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.
A portion of the total compute power shall 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.
Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating with indigenously developed software stack.
About the National Supercomputing Mission:
The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network. Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance. The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications. The Mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large Scientific & Technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.
The Mission would be implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) at an estimated cost of Rs.4500 crore over a period of seven years.
Objective:
- To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
- To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
- To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
- To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology
Application areas:
- Climate Modelling
- Weather Prediction
- Aerospace Engineering including CFD, CSM, CEM
- Computational Biology
- Molecular Dynamics
- Atomic Energy Simulations
- National Security/ Defence Applications
- Seismic Analysis
- Disaster Simulations and Management
- Computational Chemistry
- Computational Material Science and Nanomaterials
- Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics)
- Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems
- Big Data Analytics
- Finance
- Information repositories/ Government Information Systems
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