‘PARAM Ananta’, a supercomputing facility under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has been commissioned at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) today.
The new facility will provide a tremendous amount of computational power to the scientific community of IITGN as well as the academic institutions and industries in the vicinity of the Institute to take their Research and Development (R&D) efforts to a global scale. It will also further accelerate and strengthen the Institute’s collaborative R&D activities.
From a larger perspective, the technological and research advancement aided by this supercomputing facility will ultimately transform people’s lives at various levels.
Smt Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator and Scientist G, MeitY, commissioned the facility in the presence of Prof Amit Prashant, Officiating Director, IITGN; Dr Hemant Darbari, Mission Director- NSM; Col A K Nath (Retd), Executive Director (Corporate Strategy), C-DAC Pune; Dr Namrata Pathak, Associate Head/Scientist F, DST; Shri Naveen Kumar, Scientist D, MeitY; Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Senior Director & Convenor NSM; Shri Prashant Dinde, Associate Director, C-DAC; Shri B S V Ramesh, Joint Director & Co-ordinator for PARAM Ananta; along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, C-DAC, and IITGN.
“Ananta”, the name of the supercomputer, literally means ‘endless’ or ‘limitless’. The logo design symbolises the Sudarshan Chakra in the form of the Sun along with data grid mountains merging in perspective with the limitless horizon.
The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers in solving large-scale problems in different fields of Science and Engineering. The 838 teraflops (TF) Supercomputing System is powered with 7400 CPU cores, 52TB RAM, 1PiB of storage space, and an enormous power of GPU nodes along with the usual software stack required to run high-end simulations.
This massive infrastructure will provide impetus to the Research and Development (R&D) activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology at the Institute, including, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); Computational Biology and Bioinformatics; Climate Change and Environment studies for extreme weather predictions;; Energy studies; Fire Dynamics Simulations; Nanotechnology; Computational Physics; Image Processing; and so on.
Speaking on the occasion, Smt Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator and Scientist G, MeitY, said, “As the facility is being commissioned at IITGN, we are very confident that its computing power will be used by the faculty, researchers, students of IITGN and other research institutions in the vicinity to come up with new applications in diverse areas of research for the benefit of society. The technical prowess we will be able to achieve with such facilities will not only push the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ but also ‘Designing and Nurturing in India’, which is also the spirit of the National Supercomputing Mission. I wish you success and excellent use of this facility. ”
Underlining the importance of the facility at IITGN, Prof Amit Prashant, Officiating Director, IITGN, said, “It’s a pleasure to share the passion in building and commissioning this facility that will have a far-reaching positive impact on our society. We are very excited to have this supercomputing facility on the IITGN campus, and our faculty members are already planning to apply its potential in various areas of research. We look forward to working with C-DAC, DST, and MeitY in utilising this powerful system to advance the technological development of the country.”
IITGN had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the C-DAC in October 2020 to install a Supercomputing System at the Institute under the National Supercomputing Mission, which supports the government’s vision of ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives and aims to consolidate efforts for achieving self-reliance in supercomputing for India.