28-Mar-2022: Petascale Supercomputer Param Shakti inaugurated at IIT Kharagpur under National Supercomputing Mission

PARAM Shakti”, a Petascale Supercomputer “at IIT Kharagpur, has been 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). The supercomputer was inaugurated on March 27, 2022 by Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar, Honourable Governor, West Bengal in gracious presence of Prof V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur; Dr. Sivaji Chadaram, Director, DST; Col A.K Nath (Retd), Director General and Executive Director, CDAC; Prof Amit Patra, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur; Shri Arvind Kumar, Group Coordinator, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Shri 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 neighbouring academic and R&D institutes.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and 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 pertaining to diversified applications.

IIT Kharagpur has been following the mandate of NSM towards 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 centres for training in HPC and AI and working on development manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation. This centre has been organizing courses, workshops, bootcamps etc. in various domains pertaining to 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 of 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. Furthermore, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for IIT Kharagpur 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.

8-Mar-2022: Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” established at IIT Roorkee under National Supercomputing Mission

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) which is being steered jointly by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has progressed significantly. 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.

C-DAC has been entrusted the responsibility to design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems under the build approach of Mission. The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops. Till now C-DAC has deployed 11 systems at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC under NSM Phase-1 and Phase-2 with a cumulative compute power of more than 20 Petaflops. Total 36,00,000 computational jobs have been successfully completed by around 3600 researchers across the nation on the NSM systems to date. The supercomputer infrastructure installed at various Institutes across the country have helped the R&D community to achieve major milestones, objectives and products for scientific and societal applications.

Under the build approach, C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem in a phased manner, which is leading to indigenously designed and manufactured supercomputers. It has designed and developed a compute server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.

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.

As part of its tireless journey of success, NSM has now deployed “PARAM Ganga”, a supercomputer at IIT Roorkee, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops. The system is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM. Substantial components utilized 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. Availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering with a focus to provide computational power to user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions. This national Supercomputing Facility was inaugurated on March 07, 2022 by Shri B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Roorkee in gracious presence of Prof A K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, Dr Hemant Darbari, Mission Director, NSM, Shri Naveen Kumar, Scientist D, NSM Program Division, MeitY, Prof Manoranjan Parida, Deputy Director, IIT Roorkee, Shri S A Kumar, Advisor NSM, Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director, C-DAC, Pune and Convener- NSM Expert Group on Infrastructure, Dr Sivaji Chadaram, Scientist - F, DST along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC.

22-Feb-2022: India evolving as frontrunner in high power computing

India is fast evolving as a frontrunner in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM) with Supercomputing infrastructure already installed in 10 premier institutions like IITs, IISc, IISER Pune, JNCASR Bengaluru, various C-DACs, NABI Mohali, and benefitting researchers from several other institutions too. The final stage installation work is being carried out in 5 more institutions.

This will not only help meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics, and drug discovery, but also firm up indigenous capability of developing supercomputers.

As part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has installed Param Pravega, one of the most powerful Indian supercomputers. Param Pravega having a supercomputing power of 3.3 petaflops, is the largest supercomputer that has been installed in an Indian academic institution.

Going ahead, design and development of indigenous server nodes, interconnect switch, storage, and system software stack for next generation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems has been initiated with 85% indigenous manufacturing. This includes India’s first indigenous server platform called ‘Rudra’, which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs as well as the strategic needs of the country.

Besides, a next-generation indigenous HPC interconnect called “Trinetra” has been designed and developed in the country for efficient inter-node communication between compute nodes. This will help improve power efficiency and also support large-scale systems.

The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone. The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country. Part of this is being imported from abroad, and part built indigenously, the latter being increased with time. 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.

PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, NABI Mohali, CDAC Bengaluru respectively.

India’s march towards leadership position in supercomputing found a fresh dimension with the convergence of HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A 200 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system created and installed in C-DAC can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads, increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times. PARAM Siddhi - AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, has achieved global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, released on 16th November 2020.

The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 11,000 HPC aware manpower and faculties. To expand the activities of the HPC training, four NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC and AI have been established at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Goa, and IIT Palakkad. These centres have also conducted online training programs in HPC, AI, and other areas.

In the upcoming year, 9 more supercomputers will be commissioned and installed in institutes like IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IUAC Delhi, CDAC-Pune, SNBNCBS, NCRA Pune, and NIC Delhi.

Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India, taking indigenous manufacturing to 85%.

This mission will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities to 100 several institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN) - the backbone for supercomputing systems.

6-Apr-2021: India emerging a leader in supercomputing

India is fast emerging a leader in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM) boosting it to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics and drug discovery.

Computing infrastructure has already been installed in four premier institutions and installation work is in rapid progress in 9 more. Completion in of Phase II of NSM in September 2021 will take the country’s computing power to 16 Petaflops (PF). MoUs have been signed with a total of 14 premier institutions of India for establishing Supercomputing Infrastructure with Assembly and Manufacturing in India. These include IITs, NITs, National Labs, and IISERs.

Infrastructure planned in NSM Phase I has already been installed and much of Phase II will be getting in place soon. Phase III, initiated this year, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops. This will include three systems of 3 PF each and one system of 20PF as a national facility.

The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone. The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country. Part of this is being imported from abroad and part built indigenously. 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.

PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.

A new dimension has now been added in India’s march towards leadership position in supercomputing with the convergence of HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A 200 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system has been created and installed in C-DAC, which can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times. PARAM Siddhi - AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, has achieved global ranking of 62 in TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, released on 16th November 2020.

The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 4500 HPC aware manpower and faculties till date. To expand the activities of the HPC training, four NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC and AI have been established at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Goa and IIT Palakkad. These centres have conducted online training programs in HPC and in AI.

Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India. While in Phase I, 30 percent value addition is done in India that has been scaled up to 40 percent in Phase II. India has developed an Indigenous server (Rudra), which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs.

The three phases will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities to around 75 institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN) - the backbone for supercomputing systems.

21-Oct-2020: India progressing rapidly towards the goal of indigenously made Supercomputers

India is fast expanding its supercomputer facilities and developing the capacity to manufacture its own supercomputers in the country.

The National Super Computing Mission (NSM) is rapidly boosting high power computing in the country through its various phases to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as also genomics, and drug discovery.

With the infrastructure planned in NSM Phase-I already installed and much of Phase-II in place, the network of supercomputers through the country will soon reach to around 16 Petaflops (PF). Phase-III, to be initiated in January 2021, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops.

NSM is jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Param Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by Param Shakti and Param Brahma at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune, respectively.

Thereafter supercomputing facilities were set up in two more institutions, and one is being set up in Phase-I, ramping up high power computing speed to 6.6 PF under Phase-1. In Phase-II, 8 more institutions will be equipped with supercomputing facilities by April 2021, with a total of 10 PF compute capacity. MoUs have been signed with total 14 premier institutions of India for establishing Supercomputing Infrastructure with Assembly and Manufacturing in India. These include IITs, NITs, National Labs, and IISERs. Some of these have already been installed, and some more will be done by December this year. The Phase-II installations will be completed by April 2021.

Work on Phase-III will start in 2021 and will include three systems of 3 PF each and one system of 20PF as a national facility.

The three phases will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities to around 75 institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN) - the backbone for supercomputing systems.

HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have converged together. A 100 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system is being created and installed in C-DAC, which can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times.

The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 2400 supercomputing manpower and faculties till date.

Indigenous capability

Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India. While in Phase-I, 30 percent value addition is done in India, that has been scaled up to 40 percent in Phase-II.

Efforts are being made to design and develop parts like server board, interconnect, processor, system software libraries, storage, and HPC-AI converged accelerator domestically.

India has developed an Indigenous server (Rudra), which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs. This is the first time that a server system was made in India, along with the full software stack developed by C-DAC.

Experts said that the pace at which things are moving forward, we may soon have the motherboards and sub-systems manufactured in India, making the supercomputers indigenously designed and manufactured.

Such indigenously designed systems with most parts designed and manufactured in India will be installed at places like IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Chennai, and Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) at Delhi, C-DAC, Pune, which are covered under Phase-III and help move towards supercomputers developed and manufactured totally in India paving the way for self-reliance in the field. 

23-Mar-2020: National Supercomputing Mission: a transformative approach in supercomputing

The 2020-21 is an important year for India’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The mission 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.

A first of its kind attempt to boost the country’s computing power, the National Super Computing Mission is steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of National importance across the country by 2022. This network of Supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more compute power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.

With the revised plan in place, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT (BHU) and was inaugurated by the Prime Minister. Similar systems Param Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science.

Plans are afoot to install three more supercomputers by April 2020, one each at IIT-Kanpur, JN Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, and IIT-Hyderabad. This will ramp up the supercomputing facility to 6 PF.

11 new systems are likely to be set up in different IITs, NITs, National Labs, and IISERs across India by December this year, which will have many sub-systems manufactured and microprocessors designed in India which will bring in a cumulative capacity of 10.4 petaflops.

Spreading out the reach to the North-East region of the country, 8 systems with a total Compute Power of 16 PF are being commissioned. 5 indigenously designed systems with three 3 PF computing power will be installed at IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Chennai and Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) at Delhi with NKN as its backbone. It also includes an indigenously build 20 PF system at C-DAC, Pune, and a 100 PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system. One midlevel 650 TFs system is also to be installed at C-DAC Bengaluru to provide consultancy to Start-ups, SSIs & MSMEs.

Geared to provide Supercomputing facility to about 60-70 institutions Nation-wide and more than thousands of active Researchers, Academicians, and so on, NSM has gathered momentum and is moving fast not only towards creating a computer infrastructure for the country but also to build capacity of the country to develop the next generation of supercomputer experts.

15-Dec-2018: India's CDAC, France's Atos sign Rs 4.5-bn deal for supercomputer network

India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and France's IT services company Atos signed a three-year industrial contract for designing, building and installing the BullSequana, its high-performance supercomputers, in the country.

This contract has been awarded to Atos under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), a scheme of Rs 45 billion, aimed at creating a network of over 70 high-performance supercomputing facilities for various academic and research institutions across India.

This contract is of special importance as Atos has become India's preferred industrial partner in a highly strategic field. The delivery of BullSequana supercomputers is expected to start in early next year.

27-Aug-2021: QSim is the gateway for Indian scientists to take us in direction of future demands of computing power, MoS IT Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, launched QSim – Quantum Computer Simulator Toolkit, to enable Researchers and Students to carryout research in Quantum Computing in a cost effective manner here today. Shri Ajay Prakash Sawhney, and senior officers from the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology also attended the event. Prof. K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to Govt. of India, Prof. Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc Bangalore, Prof. Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, Ms. Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM, Dr. Sudhir Kamat, DG (MED&COS), DRDO and many other dignitaries joined the event virtually.

QSim is an outcome of the project “Design and Development of Quantum Computer Toolkit (Simulator, Workbench) and Capacity Building”. This is one of the first initiatives in the country to address the common challenge of advancing the Quantum Computing research frontiers in India. This project is being executed collaboratively by IISc Bangalore, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC with the support of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India.

Addressing the event, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that we are coming to an era where conventional computing power growth through the traditional means of silicon and semiconductor is drawing to a close and now we are going to see the next generation of computing power growth comes from a combination of software new architectures, system redesign and new system paradigms and that is where the quantum computing comes and is clearly going to be the cutting edge of the future demands of computing power. QSim is the Gateway for Indian scientists to take us in that direction.

Shri Chandrasekhar further added that as a nation we have come a long way as community of scientists. He expressed his happiness QSim is result of collaborative efforts of research and development which in he said is a way to grow our technological capabilities. He said that we have tremendous amount of talent in this country. Future of our Nation's technological capabilities will be driven to a large extent by how effectively we work in a collaborative manner and pick and assemble the best brains from across the country to create the technologies OF future. Ministry of Electronics and IT is determined to help our country grow its technological capabilities. With collaborative model of working India can reach greater heights in terms of technology leadership of the world.

Speaking on the occasion, Shri Ajay Prakash Sawhney said that QSim is a very initial step and this would be strengthened by the MTech program that has already been launched by IISc Bangalore. Taking the lead from IISc Bangalore other institutes might also like to join that because strength that we have in India is of human resource and with this strength we may go deeper and deeper into any technology whatsoever.

QSim, the toolkit launched today, allows researchers and students to write and debug Quantum Code that is essential for developing Quantum Algorithms. Quantum systems are highly sensitive to disturbances from environment, even necessary controls and observations perturb them. The available and upcoming Quantum devices are noisy and techniques to bring down the environmental error rate are being intensively pursued. QSim allows researchers to explore Quantum Algorithms under idealized conditions and help prepare experiments to run on actual Quantum Hardware. QSim can serve as an important educational / research tool providing an excellent way to attract students / researchers to the field of Quantum Technology and provides a platform to acquire the skills of ‘programming’ as well as ‘designing’ real Quantum Hardware.

QSim - Feature Highlights

• Intuitive UI: QSim offers a robust QC Simulator integrated with a GUI based Workbench allowing students / researchers to create Quantum programs, visualize the instant circuit generation and simulated outputs.
• Simulate noisy Quantum logic circuits: Helps simulate Quantum circuits with and without noise and test how well various algorithms work with imperfect quantum components. This is essential to simulate real-life conditions.
• Pre-loaded Quantum algorithms and Examples: QSim comes loaded with Quantum programs and algorithms providing a head start to the users. E.g. QFT, Deutsch Jozsa, Grovers and so on.
• Integrated with HPC: The quantum simulations are performed on powerful HPC resources allowing multiple users to submit jobs simultaneously with different QuBit configurations.

QSim - Offering Models

• PARAM SHAVAK QSim - Standalone system with Quantum Simulator in a box
• PARAM QSim Cloud - Available on cloud using HPC infrastructure PARAM SIDDHI AI (developed and deployed under NSM program)