Petascale Supercomputer installed in India’s oldest institute

The 1.66 PFLOPS supercomputer was installed at the 175-year-old Indian college. [Courtesy]

A supercomputer with a speed of up to 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations Per Second) has been installed at the oldest engineering institution in Asia.

The Petascale supercomputer has been deployed at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, which was founded in 1847.

In the computing world, PFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations, that require floating-point calculations. It is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

Developed under a joint initiative of India’s Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the new innovation will offer computational power to the community of IIT Roorkee as well as neighbouring academic institutions.

There are a significant number of Kenya students studying in various Indian universities.

The 175-year-old IIT Roorkee had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the CDAC earlier to establish state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities involving critical components like motherboards for servers, direct contact liquid cooling data centres in India.

"IIT Roorkee will carry out advanced research and capacity building using this supercomputing infrastructure developed under NSM. I am happy to see that the critical components of PARAM Ganga, such as motherboards for compute nodes and direct contact liquid cooling data centres, are manufactured in India as per the Government of India initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat,” the institute’s Board of Governors, Mohan Reddy, Chairman told ANI News.

"The basic idea behind building a Petascale Supercomputer with manufactured in India components is to accelerate the problem-solving capacity in multidisciplinary domains simultaneously.

To this effect, "PARAM Ganga", the new high-performance computational (HPC) facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance.

The new HPC infrastructure will serve as an essential compute environment for the modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work."