Param Shakti Facility Launched at IIT Kharagpur
The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems in different fields of Science and Engineering.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) have jointly taken the initiative to launch PARAM Shakti facility, a Petascale Supercomputing facility at IIT Kharagpur, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
The supercomputer was inaugurated on March 27, 2022, by Jagdeep Dhankhar, Honourable Governor, West Bengal in the gracious presence of V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur; Sivaji Chadaram, Director, DST; Col A.K Nath (Retd), Director General and Executive Director, CDAC; Amit Patra, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur; Arvind Kumar, Group Coordinator, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; S A Kumar, Advisor NSM, MeitY, along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC.
PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighboring academic and R&D institutes.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of-the-art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs.
This facility has pioneered in using RDHX based efficient cooling system to obtain a high-power usage effectiveness.
This system has been tested extensively by both IIT Kharagpur and CDAC for commercial, open-source and in-house software for diversified applications.
IIT Kharagpur has been following the mandate of NSM towards the development of computationally efficient software for supercomputing platforms and applications for large-scale industrial and scientific problems.
IIT Kharagpur is also one of the NSM nodal centers for training in HPC and AI and working on the development manpower required for Supercomputing Research across the nation.
This center has been organizing courses, workshops, boot camps, etc. in various domains about fundamentals of supercomputing and data sciences and their application to diversified fields including Agriculture, Astronomy, Biology, Mechanical Engineering, Material Sciences, etc. IIT Kharagpur has also established the Centre for Computational and Data Science with a mandate to train the researchers in Supercomputer accelerated R&D.
The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems in different fields of Science and Engineering.
Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing-based research will be of great value addition are Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials, etc.
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.
