In News:

=> Recently, National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) has deployed a supercomputer system called PARAM-Ganga with 1.66 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) of computing power at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee.

• A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.

About PARAM Ganga:

=> It is designed, developed, and commissioned by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

=> It has components manufactured and assembled in India and availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering with a focus to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.

About National Supercomputing Mission:

=> It is an important initiative by the Government of India to boost indigenous efforts to be in the forefront of supercomputing capability for socio-economic development of the nation.

=> The mission was jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and Department of Science & Technology.

=> It is being implemented through two leading organisations – Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore with an objective to meet the increasing computing demands of the scientific and research community.

=> This initiative supports the government’s vision of “Digital India” and “Make in India” and will place India at the forefront of the global supercomputing map.

=> It aims to deploy 24 facilities with a combined computing power of more than 64 petaFLOPS.

• The computing power of supercomputers is measured in floating-point operations per second or FLOPS.
• One petaFLOP is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) FLOPS, or one thousand teraFLOPS.

=> The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realise the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.

Objective:

=> To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance

=> To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains.

=> To minimise redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimise investments in supercomputing

=> To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology