Param Ananta Supercomputer Commissioned at IIT Gandhinagar
Article By : PIB India
The Param Ananta Supercomputing Facility will greatly benefit IIT Gandhinagar's R&D activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology.
Param Ananta, a state-of the art supercomputer at IIT Gandhinagar dedicated to the nation under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)—a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST)—was commissioned on May 30, 2022 by Smt. Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator & Scientist ‘G’, MeitY, in presence of Prof. Amit Prashant, officiating Director, IIT Gandhinagar; Col. A.K. Nath (Retd.), Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune; Shri Naveen Kumar, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Dr. Hemant Darbari, Mission Director- NSM; Dr. Namrata Pathak, Associate Head/Scientist F, DST; Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director, C-DAC; Shri Prashant Dinde, Associate Director, CDAC , Shri B S V Ramesh, Joint Director, CDAC along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Gandhinagar and C-DAC. PARAM ANANTA 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 IIT Gandhinagar and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on October 12, 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 to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
The Param Ananta is based on direct contact liquid cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reduce the operational cost. The Param Ananta Supercomputing Facility will greatly benefit IIT Gandhinagar’s R&D activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology, including, but not limited to, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); bio-engineering for genome sequencing and DNA studies; computational biology and bioinformatics used in prediction and detection of gene networks; atomic and molecular sciences that helps in understanding how a drug binds to a particular protein; climate change and environment studies for extreme weather predictions and simulation of models which can predict the onset of a cyclone; energy studies which will help in carrying out design simulation and optimization of energy conversion devices at various scales; fire dynamics simulation; nanotechnology; robotics; applied mathematics; astronomy and astrophysics; material sciences; quantum mechanics; and studies on civil engineering and structural mechanics to understand the dynamic behavior of buildings, bridges, and complex structure.
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 R&D initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.
Under NSM, around 15 supercomputers to date have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and are operating on indigenously developed software stack.