PARAM ANANTA SUPERCOMPUTER

Context

Recently, the PARAM ANANTA Supercomputer has been commissioned at IIT Gandhinagar.

About

• PARAM ANANTA supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
• NSM is a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• It is a 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility and is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology.
• Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. 
• All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating on indigenously developed software stack developed by Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

What is a supercomputer?

• A computer with a high level of computing performance compared to a general purpose computer and performance measured in FLOPS (floating point operations per second).
• Great speed and great memory are the two prerequisites of a supercomputer.
• The performance is generally evaluated in petaflops (1 followed by 15 zeros).
• Memory is averaged around 250000 times of the normal computer we use on a daily basis.
• Housed in large clean rooms with high air flow to permit cooling.
• Used to solve problems that are too complex and huge for standard computers.

About National Supercomputing Mission

• It was launched in 2015 to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.
• The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country.
• Part of this is being imported from abroad and partly built indigenously.
• The Mission is being jointly implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
• Objectives: To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.
• To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.