The Indian Institute of Science installs ‘Param Pravega’ under National Supercomputing Mission.

Why in news?

• The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega, one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
• It has a total supercomputing capacity of 3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion, or 1015 operations per second).
• It has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
• A majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within India, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
• 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.

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

• NSM is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
• The Mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc., in IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.
• About 31,00,000 computational jobs have successfully been carried out by around 2,600 researchers across India till date.