Pune
September 27, 2024

India's Scientific Leap: PARAM RUDRA Supercomputers Unveiled

Three State-of-the-art Supercomputing facilitiesunder the PARAM RUDRA series were dedicated to the nation as a part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

On Sept 27th, Shri Narendra Modi, Hon'ble - Prime Ministerlaunched the facilities located atInter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC), Delhi; S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata and GMRT, Pune. Hon'blePM inaugurated the facilities of Inter University Accelerator Centre, New Delhi, S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata and GMRT, Pune in remote mode. Shri Bhuvnesh Kumar, Additional Secretary, MeitY;Smt Sunita Verma, Group Co-ordinator (R&D), MeitY; Shri E Magesh, Director General, C-DAC; Prof. Avinash Chandra Pandey, Director - IUAC, Delhi; Col. Asheet Nath (Retd.), Executive Director, C-DAC; Dr. Hemant Darbari, Mission Director- NSM; Prof. Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta, Director -S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata; Prof. Jayaram Chengalur, Director - TIFR and many more dignitaries graced the occasion.

India's technical prowess is critical to its future and High-Performance computing capabilityis one of the indicators. The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), patronized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is a major Govt. of India initiative aimed at enhancing the nation's supercomputing capabilities. It facilitates the rapid advancement of groundbreaking research that meets the needs of the scientific and research community to solve the grand challenge problems faced by the nation in diverse areas like disaster management, climate modelling, drug discovery & repurposing, oil exploration etc. NSM is aligned with the government's goals of Atmanibhar Bharat and Digital India.It enables India to establish its footprinton the global supercomputing landscape.

The PARAM Rudra Supercomputers are presently being built as part ofNSM Phase 3 using indigenously designed and manufactured Rudra servers, which is a major step toward reaching the mission's milestones of creating cumulative compute power of 64 Petaflop.C-DAC's indigenously developed software stack based on open-source tools and in-house softwareis an integral part of the above systems which enhances the efficiency and ease of system usage for both users and administrators.

1. The supercomputing facility setup at Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC), Delhi which is India's premier laboratory for university researchers has a facility having peak computing power of 3 PetaFlops.The facility is equipped with 650 RUDRA based compute nodes. Energy-efficient liquid cooling technology is being used to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the data center by efficiently cooling the servers.It will benefit in strengthening research in the areas of Material Science, Radiation Biology, Atomic Physics, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Plasma Research, Detector Development, etc. and benefit the institutes associated with IUAC.
2. The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) is located near Pune, India, and is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), is a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).This cutting-edge system aims to run astronomical science applications, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe's dynamic aspects.The 1 PetaFlopsupercomputing facility with all nodes equipped with GPUat GMRT bolsters India's leadership in radio astronomy and leverages AI & ML to enhance GMRT's sensitivity to cosmological signals that are present for only a millisecond.
3. The supercomputing facility established at S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Kolkata hasa peak computing power of 838 TeraFlops. This facility will strengthen the research in materials science, earth science, chemical and biological sciences, high energy physics, cosmology, and astrophysics, among others. It will also provide an opportunity to the nearby associated institutes to leverage the facility to carry out path breaking research.

C-DAC has designed and developed the servers and transferred the technology to three Indian companies viz M/s VVDN Technologies, M/s Kaynes Technology India Ltd and M/sAvalon Technologies Limited. The servers in the facilities inaugurated now come from M/s VVDN Technologies, Gurgaon. NSM demonstrates India's technological self-reliance and commitment to scientific advancement, contributing significantly to the nation's vision of Viksit Bharat 2047.