25-May-2022: PARAM PORUL Supercomputer inaugurated at NIT, Tiruchirappalli

PARAM PORUL, a state-of the art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), was inaugurated on May 25, 2022 by Shri Bhaskar Bhat, Chairperson Board of Governors, Tiruchirappalli in gracious presence of Prof. G. Aghila, Director, NIT Tiruchirappalli; Shri E Magesh, Director General, C-DAC, Shri Naveen Kumar, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Shri S A Kumar, Advisor, NSM, MeitY, Dr. Hemant Darbari, Mission Director- NSM, Dr Namrata Pathak, DST; Dr. Nagaboopathy Mohan, DST, Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director, C-DAC, along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, NIT Tiruchirappalli and C-DAC. PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between NIT Tiruchirappalli and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on 12th October 2020 to establish this 838 Teraflops Supercomputing Facility under NSM.  The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage and high performance Infiniband interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications. PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.  Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers. This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.

NIT, Tiruchirappalli has been carrying out research in the areas of societal interest such as Health, Agriculture, Weather, Financial Services. The facility installed under NSM will strengthen this research. The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering. 

A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM. Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. 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.

Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating with indigenously developed software stack.

4-May-2022: Researchers find ways for broader design & engineering of reconfigurable magnonic crystals that can transfer information more efficiently than electrons

Sometime in the future, magnons may replace electrons as carriers of our thoughts and commands more efficiently. Researchers have found ways for broader design and engineering of reconfigurable functional magnonic crystals, which can show the way for magnon based computing systems and bring about a paradigm shift in computing and communication devices.

Electrons, the lightest known particles, almost two thousand times lighter than the proton, are carriers of information in all “electronic” devices. As the electrons drift in the semiconducting device of the CPU, the signal moves almost at the speed of light. However, this drift generates heat in the device, which has to be fanned out of the CPU.

Scientists around the world are thus looking for materials in which magnetic spin waves can be used to transport information without generation of heat. Magnons are particle avatars of spin waves which can ripple through a lattice of tiny ferromagnetic particles of nano dimensions. Since magnons are quasiparticles, their movement through the material does not generate any heat. The promise held by magnons has led to magnonics, a budding research field in nanoscience that deals with the excitation, propagation, control and detection of magnons or spin waves through periodic magnetic media.

Research scientists at the Spintronics & Spin Dynamics Lab at the S.N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology, have recently merged magnonics with “Artificial Spin Ice”, creating ways for broader design and engineering of reconfigurable functional magnonic crystals. Artificial spin ice or ASI are metamaterials made up of coupled nanomagnets arranged on different lattices. The tag ‘ice’ comes from the similarity in molecular structure with tetrahedron shaped ice crystals in which two hydrogen atoms are close to the central oxygen atom, and two are far. The spin ice material, too, is made of corner linked tetrahedra. Each vertex of the tetrahedron is a magnetic ion which has a magnetic moment. In their low energy state, they follow a two in–two out arrangement.

Artificial spin ice (ASI) systems replicate the principles of the spin ice systems. According to the scientists, “The successful use of ASI as a functional magnonic crystal will depend upon the efficient reconfigurability of their magnetic microstates and the ensuing spin-wave properties.” This precisely is the crux of their research.

The study is collaboration between S. N. Bose Centre and Imperial College, London. While the ASI structures have been fabricated at the Imperial College in the laboratory headed by Dr William. R. Branford, Prof. Anjan Barman’s team at the S. N. Bose Centre, is studying the behaviour of magnons in these ASI structures.

Using an experimental set-up developed in house, the S. N. Bose Centre scientists are studying the samples through Brillouin light scattering (BLS). BLS is an inelastic light scattering phenomenon of light quanta photons from quasiparticles like magnons or phonons, which can help in understanding spin-wave propagation and dispersion under the influence of an external magnetic field. Earlier experiments had mainly used the ferromagnetic resonance technique (FMR), which helped in studying the global or large-scale behaviour of ASI. Hence, the BLS method is a breakaway from the earlier experimental methods. Experimental observations using BLS are consolidated and extrapolated through simulations.

Their studies published in ACS Publications show that the ASI systems can potentially give rise to a huge variety of magnetic microstates, which can be globally or locally controlled by a magnetic field. This would lead to the effective formation of different magnonic crystals by subtle changes in the external magnetic field, more like origami or a kaleidoscope. Therefore, different functions of magnonic circuit components can be performed in the same active element or magnonic crystal only by externally tuning a modest magnetic field, saving huge cost and energy.