India's fastest supercomputer Param Yuva-II launched

Tech2
February 09, 2013

Ushering a moment of pride for the country, J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, launched PARAM Yuva - II, the new 500 TeraFlop version of its earlier PARAM Yuva at C-DAC Pune, yesterday.

With the launch of PARAM Yuva –II, C-DAC has taken a quantum jump towards creating a general purpose research-oriented computational environment. This system is designed to solve large and complex computational problems. This will provide an opportunity for new scientific endeavors for the research community. By making use of hybrid technology, the increase in peak compute power from 54 Teraflop/s to 524 Teraflop/s has been achieved without any significant change in the electrical power consumed by the facility.

The system achieved a sustained performance of 360.8 Teraflop/s on Community standard Linpack benchmark. In comparison to November 2012 List of World’s Top 500 supercomputers, PARAM Yuva – II would have stood at 62nd position in the world and at number 1 position in the country. In terms of power efficiency, it is better than most supercomputing systems and would have achieved 33rd position in the November 2012 List of Top Green 500 supercomputers of the world.

Satyanarayana dedicated the new and powerful supercomputer to the High Performance Computing (HPC) user community in the country. The launch of PARAM Yuva II was conducted as part of the Workshop on National Mission on Supercomputing being organised by C-DAC, Pune.

Speaking on the occasion of the launch, Satyanarayana congratulated C-DAC for achieving the 500 TF compute power and reiterated the support of the Indian government to "establish India’s place as the primary destination for advanced R&D across the global landscape. While the Indian IT sector has always been at the top, the dynamics of the market especially in the light of financial meltdowns force us to take a relook at juggling our priorities. Advanced R&D in emerging areas can be a major interest area for India as nations struggle to find viable solutions within budget constraints. Computational infrastructure and trained manpower will be the initial pre-requisites to take the initiative forward. The Government of India has always been in support of the R&D community and with institutions like C-DAC leading the way forward, the future certainly looks bright for the nation."

PARAM Yuva – II provides more than half a Petaflop of raw compute power using hybrid compute technology with compute co-processor and hardware accelerators. The interconnection network comprises home grown PARAMNet-III and Infiniband FDR System Area Network. PARAM Yuva –II has 200 Terabytes of high performance storage and support software for parallel computing.

Addressing the media, Prof Rajat Moona, Director General, C-DAC, expressed his happiness and pride "to be able to deliver India’s first 500 TF supercomputer through C-DAC. Way back in 1991, C-DAC had successfully designed, developed and launched the first ever supercomputer in India. Over the subsequent years, C-DAC has consolidated its capabilities in the supercomputing arena to be able to proliferate its key benefits to the scientific community in the form of national supercomputing facilities. C-DAC has also set the precedent by developing the first Gigascale and first Terascale system in the country. C-DAC is committed to grow supercomputing technologies and applications further in collaboration with various agencies in India and abroad."

With this launch, C-DAC also becomes the first R&D institution in India to cross the 500 TF milestone.

Also present on the occasion were Prof. N. Balakrishnan, Associate Director, IISc, Prof Rajat Moona, Director General, C-DAC, Dr Pradeep K Sinha, Sr Director (HPC), Dr Hemant Darbari, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune, Dr Sarat C Babu, Executive Director, C-DAC, Bengaluru and other senior officials from R&D institutions across the nation.