C-DAC and IIT Gandhinagar join forces to unveil supercomputer Param Ananta

The Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and IIT Gandhinagar has presented ‘Param Ananta,’ India’s newest supercomputer. This advancement is consistent with the National Supercomputing Mission’s second phase (NSM).

The maximum performance of the Param Ananta system is 838 teraflops. This increased computer capability will accelerate research efforts in various domains, including bioengineering, computational fluid dynamics, data science, machine learning, etc. The majority of the system’s equipment is built and assembled in India under the ‘Make in India’ initiative. The system comprises a mixture of CPU and GPU nodes and storage and memory modules with high throughput and bandwidth.

In a statement, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said, “The state-of-the-art supercomputer Param Infinite was to the nation as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at IIT Gandhinagar. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology collaborate on this endeavour.”

Despite its vast computing capacity, siddhi-AI, which has a peak performance of 3.3 petaflops, exceeded Param Ananta. The government has already deployed twelve supercomputers to renowned academic institutions, such as IIT Kharagpur, IIT Roorkee, and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. Meanwhile, CDAC, Pune, has installed the top supercomputer 210 AI PetaFlops Param Siddhi with a processing speed of 6.5 petaflops.

The Param Ananta supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission, with the majority of the system’s components made and installed domestically, along with a software stack developed by C-DAC by the Make in India program.

The Param Ananta Supercomputing Facility will be able to support IIT Gandhinagar’s research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology, including but not limited to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), bio-engineering for genome sequencing and DNA studies, computational biology and bioinformatics used in prediction and detection of genotoxic compounds, and CFD. It can aid atomic and molecular sciences in understanding the binding of a medication to a specific protein.