IISc. commissions one of India’s most powerful supercomputers – Param Pravega

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore has installed and commissioned Param Pravega super computer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution.

Param Pravega Supercomputer

1. PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India.
2. PARAM means “supreme” in the Sanskrit language, whilst also creating an acronym for “Parallel Machine”.
3. Designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the system, which is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits, has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second). 
4. Param Pravegam Supercomputer system has been installed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), which has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.

Param Pravega Supercomputer system at IISc

The Param Pravega system at IISc is a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes. The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops.

Historical background

1. IISc already has a cutting-edge supercomputing facility established several years ago. In 2015, the Institute procured and installed SahasraT, which was at that time the fastest supercomputer in the country.
2. Faculty members and students have been using this facility to carry out research in various impactful and socially-relevant areas. These include research on Covid-19 and other infectious diseases, such as modelling viral entry and binding, studying interactions of proteins in bacterial and viral diseases, and designing new molecules with antibacterial and antiviral properties.
3. Researchers have also used the facility to simulate turbulent flows for green energy technologies, study climate change and associated impacts, analyse aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles, and many other research activities. These efforts are expected to ramp up significantly with Param Pravega supercomputer.