PARAM ANANTAa state-of-the-art Made-in-India supercomputer with a capacity of 838 TeraFlops, was today dedicated to the nation as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology ( DST).
“Ananta”, the name of the supercomputer, literally means “endless” or “limitless”. The logo design symbolizes the Sudarshan chakra in the form of the sun along with data grid mountains perspectively merging with the limitless horizon.
The new facility will provide the scientific community of the IITGN, as well as the academic institutions and industries close to the institute, with a tremendous amount of computing power to advance their research and development (R&D) efforts on a global scale: IITGN pic.twitter.com/NBykv7T7h2
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The supercomputer, which is the 15th supercomputer under NSM to date, was developed at the Indian Institute of Technology – Gandhinagar (IIT Gandhinagar) by Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator and Scientist “G”, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Prof. Amit in Commissioned Prashant, Acting Director, IIT Gandhinagar.
A part of the total computing power is also to be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes, according to NSM’s mandate. Additionally, NSM has sponsored a number of applied research projects utilizing this supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this supercomputing facility will give a great boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian science and industry to achieve a position of global prestige.
To date, 15 supercomputers with a total computing capacity of 24 petaflops have been installed across the country under NSM. All these supercomputers are made entirely in India.
The PARAM ANANTA supercomputing facility will be built in Phase-2 of the NSM, where most of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled in-country, along with a native software stack developed by C-DAC in line with the Make -in-India initiative.
Previously, a petascale supercomputer “PARAM Shakti” was unveiled at IIT Kharagpur in March this year. At the beginning of 2020, the government announced a 100 petaflops artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing system, PARAM Siddhi – AI, developed and installed by NVIDIA at the C-DAC facility.
PARAM ANANTA is equipped with a mixture of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, high-memory nodes, high-throughput storage and high-performance Infiniband connection to meet the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
The PARAM ANANTA Supercomputing Facility will be of great benefit to the IIT Gandhinagar to continue research and development (R&D) activities in multidisciplinary fields of science and technology at the institute including but not limited to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning ( ML ) and data science; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); bioengineering for genome sequencing and DNA studies; Computational biology and bioinformatics for prediction and detection of gene networks; Atomic and molecular sciences that help understand how a drug binds to a specific protein.
