Times of India
Oct 14, 2022

President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday commissioned the northeast’s fastest supercomputer Param-Kamrupa, a high-performance computing cluster, which will give a boost to diverse fields from healthcare to advanced weather prediction.

Deployed at IIT Guwahati, the supercomputer facility has been named after Kamrupa, the first known historical kingdom of Assam. It replaced Param-Ishan as the northeast region’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer. Param-Ishan was inaugurated in IIT Guwahati in 2016.

President Murmu and CM Sarma in Guwahati on Thursday (ANI photo)

“The computing power and speed of Param-Kamrupa is far superior to the existing supercomputer facilities in the northeast. Lot of people from diverse fields of study and research can get their jobs executed here simultaneously,” Professor Ratnajit Bhattacharjee, head of the computer communication centre at IIT Guwahati, told TOI.

He said it’s a ‘liquid cooled system’ and the heat generated by the computer system can be easily taken away.

Supercomp will also benefit other nearby institutes

Param-Kamrupa has been set up at IIT Guwahati under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) and the department of Science and Technology (DST).

"This facility will be of great benefit to IIT Guwahati to carry out research activities in various scientific domains such as weather and climate, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, data science etc.," an IIT Guwahati spokesperson said.

The supercomputing facility is equipped with advanced facilities to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications. Other facilities in and around Guwahati will also reap the benefits of the supercomputer as the NSM has mandated that a portion of the total compute power shall be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes. Sources in the institute said it has software for users from different domains and can be used even from outside the institute.

"Overall, this newly set up supercomputing facility promises to provide a major boost to the research and development activities in the entire region," the spokesperson added.

Along with the supercomputer facility, a high power active and passive component laboratory, Sameer, was also inaugurated by Murmu at the institute.