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PARAM Ambar (Advanced Machine for Basic Atmospheric Research) offers high throughput storage of 2 Petabytes and archival capacity of 1 Petabytes. (Representational Image) With the installation of ‘Param Pravega’ — claimed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country — at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, earlier this month, India has now installed at least three supercomputers in scientific institutions across the country in the last three months under the government’s National Supercomputing Mission.
So far, ten supercomputers have been installed in ten institutes with five more in the final stages, according to the department of science.
The National Supercomputing Mission is intended to indigenise the development and manufacturing of powerful computers.
This year, nine more supercomputers are likely to be commissioned at IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IUAC (Inter University Accelerator Centre) Delhi, CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) Pune, SNBNCBS (SN Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences) Kolkata, NCRA (National Centre for Radio Astrophysics) Pune, and NIC (National Informatics Centre) Delhi.
The supercomputer installed at IISc has a computing capability of 3.3 petaflops, beating the 1.6 petaflops computer at IIT Kharagpur.
Petaflops is a measure of computing capability of adding at least a quadrillion (1,000 trillion) real numbers in a second. That computer speed is equivalent to 5,000-6,000 high-end laptops working together.
The National Supercomputing Mission in its three phases plans to increase India’s supercomputing capability to 45 petaflops, which will include three systems with 3 petaflops capability and one system with 20 petaflops capability.
Entering the third phase of the mission, design and development of indigenous server nodes, interconnect switch, storage, and system software stack has been initiated with 85 per cent indigenous manufacturing.
The mission was planned in three phases with phase I looking at assembling supercomputers, phase II looking at manufacturing certain components within the country, and phase III where a supercomputer is designed by India.
An indigenously developed server platform called ‘Rudra’ is being tried out in a pilot system, with an interconnect for internode communication called Trinetra also having been developed.
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