• IIT Roorkee has installed Petascale supercomputing infrastructure to accelerate research and development in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering.

• The supercomputer — PARAM Ganga — has a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.

• A 1 TeraFlops computer system is capable of performing one trillion floating-point operations per second. The rate 1 TF is equivalent to 1,000 GigaFlops. A 1 PetaFlops computer system is capable of performing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The rate 1 PF is equivalent to 1,000 TF.

• PARAM Ganga was developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

• The system is designed and commissioned by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM. Substantial components utilised to build this system are manufactured and assembled within India along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, which is a step towards the Make in India initiative of the government. 

• The focus is to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

• In 2015, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the launch of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at an estimated cost of Rs 4,500 crore over a period of seven years. 

• The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising 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 is being jointly steered by the department of science and technology (DST) and the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

• NSM was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.

• The Mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large scientific and technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.

Objectives of NSM:

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) To minimise redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimise investments in supercomputing.

4) To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

Supercomputers established under NSM

PARAM Shivay: The first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was dedicated by PM Narendra Modi to the nation in February 2019 at IIT (BHU), Varanasi. The supercomputer of 837 TeraFlops capacity, was built at the cost of Rs 32.5 crore.

PARAM Shakti: The state-of-the-art supercomputing system at IIT Kharagpur has a peak computing power of 1.66 PetaFlops. PARAM Shakti is designed and commissioned by C-DAC to cater to the computational needs of IIT Kharagpur and nearby research, engineering and scientific institutes of the region.

PARAM Brahma: The supercomputer was established at IISER, Pune with a peak computing power of 797 TeraFlops. The system is built with the latest cutting-edge hardware and software technologies. The uniqueness of this system lies in its highly efficient cooling technology, which is based on direct contact liquid cooling.

PARAM Yukti: This was established in Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru with a peak computing power of 838 TeraFlops. 

PARAM Sanganak: This was established in IIT Kanpur with a peak computing power of 1.67 PetaFlops. 

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