Published: 14th Mar, 2022
Context
Recently, a Made in India Petascale Supercomputer "PARAM Ganga" has been installed at IIT Roorkee.
About
About National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):
- 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.
- The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is being steered jointly by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
- It is being implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
About Supercomputer:
- A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer.
- Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
- Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second.
- Some supercomputers can perform up to a hundred quadrillion FLOPS.
- Since information moves quickly between processors in a supercomputer (compared to distributed computing systems) they are ideal for real-time applications.
- Supercomputers are used for data-intensive and computation-heavy scientific and engineering purposes such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling, physical simulations, aerodynamics, nuclear fusion research and cryptoanalysis.
Fastest supercomputers: According to the TOP500 list, the world's fastest supercomputer is
- Japan's Fugaku at a speed of 442 petaflops as of June 2021.
- IBM supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, garner the second and third spots, clocking in at 148.8 and 94.6 petaflops, respectively.
India’s fastest Supercomputers:
As of June 2021 there are 3 systems based in India on the TOP500 supercomputer list.
|
Rank |
Site |
Name |
|
89 |
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing |
PARAM Siddhi-AI |
|
107 |
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology |
Pratyush (Cray XC40) |
|
187 |
National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting |
Mihir (Cray XC40) |
About “PARAM Ganga”:
- The new system, designed and commissioned by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under the auspices of the NSM, will offer 1.66 (presumably peak) petaflops.
|
About National Knowledge Network (NKN):
|
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