Param Ganga: Made-in-India Petascale Supercomputer Installed at IIT Roorkee

A Made in India Petascale Supercomputer "PARAM Ganga" has been installed at IIT Roorkee on Monday by B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. The establishment of 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations Per Second) supercomputing at IIT Roorkee by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has been built under the approach of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

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 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

IIT Roorkee had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the CDAC earlier to establish a state-of-the-art Supercomputing facility involving 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, Reddy 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 Darbari 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 (HPC) 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."