Context: Recently, National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) has deployed PARAM Ganga-a High-Performance Computational (HPC) facility at IIT Roorkee, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.

• Earlier, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru installed the supercomputer 'Param Pravega'.

About PARAM GANGA 

• It has a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations per Second). It was designed and commissioned by C-DAC under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
• The crucial components required to build PARAM GANGA are manufactured and assembled in India along with an indigenous software stack developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
• This supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities with a focus on providing computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.

About National Supercomputing Mission(NSM)

• Launched in: 2015
• Aim: To empower national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
• Nodal Ministries: The mission is being steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• Implemented by: Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

Pillars of the mission:  The four major pillars of the mission are: Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD. These pillars have been functioning efficiently to realise the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing ecosystem of the nation.

• Under the mission, C-DAC has designed and developed a computer server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.

By: Shubham Tiwari