PARAM PORUL Supercompute

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PARAM PORUL is a state-of-the-art supercomputer which was recently set up at NIT Tiruchirappalli.

About PARAM PORUL

PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
Technology:
- PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology
  - This will obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
- The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, high memory nodes, high throughput storage and high-performance Infiniband interconnect.
  - This will cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
Indigenous components:
- The majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country.
- It contains an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
Applications:
- Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, etc have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.
- The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems in different fields of Science and Engineering.

A portion of the total computing power will also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM.

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):

It was launched in 2015 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 Mission is being jointly implemented 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 has sponsored a number of applied research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for other Indian institutes and industries.
Objectives:
- 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.
- To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.
Under NSM, to 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 an indigenously developed software stack.

What are Supercomputers?

The supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer.
The performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
They are expensive and are employed for specialized applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations (number crunching).

Supercomputers developed in India:

Mihir: Mihir clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.
PARAM-Siddhi: It is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, and has achieved a global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world.
Pratyush: It is a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
PARAM Shivay: It is the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, and 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.

Source: PIB

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