“PARAM Ganga” Supercomputer

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed and commissioned a supercomputer named “PARAM Ganga”, at IIT Roorkee.

Context

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed and commissioned a supercomputer named “PARAM Ganga”, at IIT Roorkee.

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS (peta FLOPS).
Since November 2017, all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.
Currently there are four supercomputers from India in the Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.

PARAM Ganga is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM.
It is based on a heterogeneous and hybrid configuration of Intel Xeon Cascade lake processors, and NVIDIA Tesla V100.
There are 312 (CPU+GPU+HM) nodes with a total peak computing capacity of 1.67 (CPU+GPU+HM) PFLOPS performance.
The cluster consists of compute nodes connected with the Mellanox (HDR) InfiniBand interconnect network.
The system uses the Lustre parallel file system and operating system is CentOS 7.x.

NSM is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
NSM is a proposed plan by GoI to create a cluster of seventy supercomputers connecting various academic and research institutions across India.

In April 2015 the government approved the NSM with a total outlay of Rs.4500 crore for a period of 7 years.

The mission is implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.
The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
The NSM Mission aims to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.

Till date 11 systems have been deployed by C-DAC at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC under NSM Phase-1 and Phase-2 with a cumulative computing power of more than 20 Petaflops.