100 Unicorns In India – PM Mann Ki Baat

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In a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), a state-of-the-art Supercomputer, PARAM PORUL was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli recently.
NIT Tiruchirappalli and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on October 12, 2020 had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish the 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing facility under National superconducting mission which has been accomplished.

Supercomputing technology comprises supercomputers, the fastest computers in the world. Supercomputers are made up of interconnected, I/O systems, memory and processor cores.
Unlike traditional computers, supercomputers use more than one central processing unit (CPU). These CPUs are grouped into compute nodes, comprising a processor or a group of processors—symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)—and a memory block.

Supercomputing is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
Petaflops are a measure of a computer’s processing speed equal to a thousand trillion flops.
1-petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion (10¹⁵) flops.
Note: Supercomputers can be one million times more processing power than the fastest laptop.

Initially, India showcased its talent on building supercomputers at low cost with its PARAM series. To further enhance its capacity and to meet requirements, Government of India launched National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) in 2015.
Under NSM, the plan was to connect R&D institutions and academic institutions in the country using a supercomputing grid with more than 70 high performance computing facilities. Spread over the period of seven years the estimated cost of this mission is Rs. 4,500 crores.
Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) jointly guides the mission along wth C-DAC as major partner.

Phase 1 – Plan was to install 6 supercomputers with 30% value additions done in India.
Phase 2- Started in April 2021 aimed at manufacturing supercomputers in the country with an indigenous software stack. Multiple supercomputers are also being installed during this phase.
Phase 3- Focus is on design and manufacturing in the country. Phase 3, has also been initiated in 2021 and is expected to take computing speed to 45 PF.

The PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country. This includes the indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness. This also helps in 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 to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

The facility installed under NSM will strengthen research in the field of supercomputing.
The new high-performance computational facility would also aid researchers to solve large-scale problems in different areas of Science and Engineering. More so, 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.
NIT, Tiruchirappalli which has been carrying out research in the areas of societal interest such as Health, Agriculture, Weather, and Financial Services will be benefitted immensely by Param Porul.