Supercomputer PARAM PORUL Inaugurated at NIT Trichy

A state-of-the-art Supercomputer ‘PARAM PORUL’ was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). It was inaugurated by Shri Bhaskar Bhat, Chairperson Board of Governors, Tiruchirappalli. NSM is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The supercomputer was developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

The components used to build this supercomputer have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack. 

The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband interconnect to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

Under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), in October 2020, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between NIT Tiruchirappalli and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to establish the 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility.

The supercomputer has multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

Under this mission, currently, 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operate with an indigenously developed software stack.

   Important points for the exam:

• The Supercomputer ‘PARAM PORUL’ was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
• The supercomputer was developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
• The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband interconnect to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
• The supercomputer has multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

   Facts to know:

• C-DAC functions under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was launched in 2015.
• The first supercomputer of India: PARAM 8000 - PARAM stood for Parallel Machine.

Fastest Supercomputers of India: Pratyush and Mihir.