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): National Knowledge Network (NKN) was established in 2010. Its objective is to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network. It will be helpful to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative research. Implementation: National Informatics Centre (NIC), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is the implementing agency.