Param Ananta Supercomputer

In News

• Recently, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and IIT Gandhinagar have unveiled India’s latest supercomputer called ‘Param Ananta’.

About Param Ananta Supercomputer

• This development is in line with phase two of the central government’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) which is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• Computing power: 838 teraflops computing power capacity.
  • The high power supercomputer can process 838 lakh crore calculations per second.
• Indigenously developed: Manufactured and assembled under ‘Make in India’.
• Ranking: The supercomputer will rank behind C-DAC’s Param Siddhi-AI, which was the 102nd most powerful supercomputer in the world with peak performance capability of 3.3 petaflops.

Applications

• Help in Research and development activities.
• Its use will include 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.
• It can help atomic and molecular sciences to comprehend the binding of drugs to a particular protein.
• Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics etc

What is a Supercomputer?

• 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 specialised applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations (number crunching).
  • For example, weather forecasting requires a supercomputer.
  • Other uses of supercomputers include scientific simulations, (animated) graphics, fluid dynamic calculations, nuclear energy research, electronic design, and analysis of geological data (e.g. in petrochemical prospecting).
• USA’s Frontier supercomputer, run by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, was officially ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
  • It outperformed Fugaku, the second most powerful supercomputer.

 National Supercomputing Mission

• It is an important initiative by the Government of India to boost indigenous efforts to be in the forefront of supercomputing capability for socio-economic development of the nation. 
• The mission was jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and Department of Science & Technology.
• It is being implemented through two leading organisations – Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore with an objective to meet the increasing computing demands of the scientific and research community. 
• This initiative supports the government’s vision of “Digital India” and “Make in India” and will place India at the forefront of the global supercomputing map.
• It aims to deploy 24 facilities with a combined computing power of more than 64 petaFLOPS. 
  • The computing power of supercomputers is measured in floating-point operations per second or FLOPS. 
  • One petaFLOP is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) FLOPS, or one thousand teraFLOPS.
• The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realise the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.

Source: LM