Manufactured in India Petascale Supercomputer Installed at IIT Roorkee to Accelerate Research and Development

Roorkee : The establishment of 1.66 PFLOPS Supercomputing Infrastructure at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee by CDAC, under the build approach of National Supercomputing Mission, will accelerate research and development in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering. The focus is to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions. It is a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

This national Supercomputing Facility was inaugurated on March 07, 2022 by Shri B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Roorkee in the gracious presence of Prof A K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, Dr Hemant Darbari, Mission Director, NSM, Ms Sunita Verma, Scientist – G and Head Program Division, NSM, MeitY, Prof Manoranjan Parida, Deputy Director, IIT Roorkee, Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director, C-DAC, Pune and Convener-NSM Expert Group on Infrastructure along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing(CDAC) earlier to establish such a state-of the art Supercomputing Facility involving Make-In-India components, the critical components such as motherboards for servers, Direct Contact Liquid Cooling Data Centres are manufactured in India progressing towards the Government of India initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat.

While addressing the event, Shri B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Roorkee said, “IIT Roorkee will carry out advanced research and capacity building using this supercomputing infrastructure developed under NSM. I am happy to see that the critical components of PARAM Ganga, such as motherboards for compute nodes and Direct Contact Liquid Cooling Data Centres, are manufactured in India as per the Government of India initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat.”

Dr. Hemant Darbari, Mission Director, NSM and Former DG, C-DAC and an alumnus of IIT Roorkee highlighted,” The basic idea behind building a Petascale Supercomputer with manufactured in India components is to lead the path towards Aatmanirbhar Bharat and accelerate the problem solving capacity in multidisciplinary domains simultaneously. To this effect, “PARAM Ganga”, the new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance. The new HPC infrastructure will serve as an essential compute environment for the modern day research along with their theoretical and experimental work”

Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, said, “National Supercomputing Mission was launched in India in 2015 with an objective to establish state-of-the-art facilities to foster advanced research in compute power hungry areas. Under this mission, IIT Roorkee and C-DAC have joined hands to make PARAM Ganga possible. It will  provide a big boost to the research activities of IIT Roorkee in many different areas.”

IIT Roorkee will contribute towards the NSM in areas of Application and System Software Environment, capacity-building and training of the manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation. It will be mandated to make the Supercomputing Facility build under this initiative for the faculty and students for academic and research purposes. This institute has been involved in high-level research and making a remarkable contribution to the R&D in engineering and science. The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance.

The new HPC infrastructure will serve as an essential compute environment for modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work. Some of the major research areas requiring extensive use of HPC technologies envisaged at IIT Roorkee are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Molecular Dynamics, Life Sciences and Bioinformatics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Weather research and forecasting, Data Sciences, Geosciences, Ground motion simulation, Computational Chemistry, Computational Material Science, Disaster Management and Nanomaterials and many more.