Param Pravega, commissioned under the National Supercomputing Mission, is the largest of any Indian educational institution
Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega, one of India’s most powerful supercomputers, and the largest in an Indian educational institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). This system is expected to power various research and educational activities. Its total supercomputing capacity is 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to quadrillion, or 1015 operations per second).
It has been designed by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Most of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within India, with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC in line with the Make in India initiative. The NSM is jointly operated by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and is implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
The mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems at IISc so far at IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops. Around 31,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully done by around 2,600 researchers across India so far.
These systems have helped faculty members and students in carrying out major R&D activities, including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, setting up flood warning and prediction systems, and telecommunications networks. Customization included.
Param Pravega System at IISc. There’s a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes. Hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a wide peak count power of 3.3 petaflops. The software stack on top of the hardware is provided and supported by C-DAC. The machine hosts a range of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing high performance computing (HPC) applications. IISc. already has a state-of-the-art supercomputing facility established several years ago; In 2015, the institute procured and installed the Sahasra T, the fastest supercomputer in India at that time.
Faculty members and students have been using this facility to conduct research in various influential and socially relevant areas. These include research on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, such as modeling viral entry and binding, studying protein interactions in bacterial and viral diseases, and designing new molecules with antibacterial and antiviral properties. Researchers also use the facility for green energy technologies to simulate turbulent flows, study climate change and related effects, analyze aircraft engines and hypersonic flying vehicles, and many other research activities. These efforts are expected to grow significantly with great momentum.
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