The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Patna, will get its first high-performance computing (HPC) system, commonly called ‘super computer’, next year, and become the first academic institution in Bihar to have one in its category under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), said Somanath Tripathy, professor, computer science engineering and associate dean (administration) at the institute.
“We will get a 650 Teraflops (650 trillion floating point operations per second, a measure of computer performance, useful in the field of scientific computation for supercomputers) machine, by August next year. It will cost ₹20 crore (approx),” he said.
“The high-performance computing system will help in scientific research and applications in several fields, including security, artificial intelligence, telemedicine, weather forecasting, computational fluid dynamics,” added Prof Tripathy.
Presently, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Patna, has a 2-Petaflops AI scalable supercomputing facility, named Param Buddha, specially designed for artificial intelligence related applications.
“Currently, our research team is using the HPC system in agriculture, healthcare, cyber security, internet of things, and quantum computing areas,” said Aditya Sinha, director, C-DAC, Patna.
The facility is presently extended free of cost to academicians of nationwide premier institutions as well as institutions of Bihar, he added.
“If the need for computation exceeds the capacity of Param Buddha, we then make provision to connect to the more powerful 210 Petaflops AI scalable super computer facility, called Param Siddhi, installed at C-DAC, Pune,” said Sinha.
“The C-DAC has established multiple high-performance computing systems at many premier institutions across the country, as part of the National Supercomputing Mission. Along the same line, C-DAC is establishing an HPC system at IIT-Patna that is meant for complex scientific simulations having a peak capacity of 650 Teraflops (1 Teraflops is one lakh crore floating point operation per second),” added Sinha.
The C-DAC Patna HPC system is beneficial for artificial intelligence (AI) related jobs whereas IIT Patna HPC system can be used for very wide range of complex scientific problems, he said.
The National Supercomputing Mission is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), government of India. Its objective is to make India one of the world leaders in supercomputing.
The systems will give a major thrust to scientists, researchers, academicians, industrialists, and in startup ventures to work on complex problem-solving as well as in handling large data volume, which requires huge computation, he added.
Such systems are beneficial in the fields of medicine, agriculture, cyber security, quantum computing, space exploration, computational biology, computational chemistry, national security and defence applications, big data analytics, finance, and almost all sectors of high-end research where intensive computing resources are required, added Sinha.
