Param Porul Super Computer

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

PARAM PORUL, a state-of-the-art Supercomputer was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli recently. It has been established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputer Mission (NSM).

What is National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)?

• It is being implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
• Implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Focus of the mission:

• The Mission envisages empowering national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
• The Mission includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications.

Achievements:

• The first supercomputer assembled indigenously, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT (BHU).
• Similar systems Param Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science.