PARAM ANANTA, a state-of-the-art Supercomputer at IIT Gandhinagar awarded nationally under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint program of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), was approved on May 30 , 2022 by Smt. Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator & Scientist ‘G’, MeitY in front of Prof. Amit Prashant, Executive Director, IIT Gandhinagar; Col. A.K Nath (Retd.), Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune; Shri Naveen Kumar, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Drs. Hemant Darbari, Mission Director-NSM, Dr Namrata Pathak, Joint Head / Scientist F, DST; Shri Sanjay Wandhekar, Executive Director, C-DAC, Shri Prashant Dinde, Joint Director, CDAC, Shri BS V Ramesh, Joint Director, CDAC and senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Gandhinagar and C-DAC.
The PARAM ANANTA supercomputing center is established under Section 2 of the NSM, where most of the components used to build the system are built and integrated into the country, as well as a number of traditional software developed by C-DAC, in line with Make in India.A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Gandhinagar and the Center for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on 12 October 2020 to establish the 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility under NSM. The system is equipped with a combination of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory Nodes, high storage capacity and high performance Infiniband interconnect to meet the computer needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
The PARAM ANANTA system is based on Direct Contact Liquid cooling technology to achieve high power consumption efficiency and thus reduce operating costs. Many applications from various scientific fields such as Climate and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Essential Science, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. are included in the program for the benefit of researchers. This state-of-the-art computer program will be a great addition to the research community.
Climate and Environmental Climate Change Predictive Studies
The PARAM ANANTA Supercomputing Facility will be of great benefit to IIT Gandhinagar to undertake Research and Development (R&D) activities in various fields of science and technology at the Institute, including, but not limited to, Art Intelligence (AI), Mechanical Learning (ML), and Data Science; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); Bio-engineering of Genome Sequencing and DNA studies; Computational Biology and Bioinformatics used to identify and locate genetic networks; Atomic & Molecular Sciences that help to understand how a drug binds to a particular protein; Climate and Environmental Climate Change Predictive Studies and modeling models that can predict the onset of a storm; Power studies that will help to design and optimize power conversion devices on various scales; Imitating Fire Dynamics; Nanotechnology; Robots; Statistics used; Astronomy & Astrophysics; Essential Science; Quantum Mechanics; Civil Engineering and structural mechanics studies to understand the dynamic behavior of buildings, bridges; and a complex structure.
Part of the computing power will also be allocated to nearby educational and research institutions as mandated by the NSM. In addition, NSM has funded a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing Center which includes researchers from other Indian institutions and industries. Overall, the Supercomputing Center will give significant impetus to research and development programs in Indian studies and industries to achieve world-class status. Under the NSM, to date 15 computers have been installed nationwide with a total computer capacity of 24 petaflops. All of these great computers are made in India and work with a stack of native software.
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