Supercomputer Param Pravega

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega.

Context

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega.

It is one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
According to IISc, Param Pravega has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1,015 operations per second).
The system is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits. It has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1015 operations per second).
It has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
A majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within India.

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 (petaFLOPS).
They are expensive and are employed for specialised applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations (number crunching).

For example, weather forecasting requires a supercomputer.
Other uses of supercomputers include scientific simulations, (animated) graphics, fluid dynamic calculations, nuclear energy research, electronic design, and analysis of geological data (e.g. in petrochemical prospecting).

Since November 2017, all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.

NSM is a proposed plan by GoI to create a cluster of seventy supercomputers connecting various academic and research institutions across India.

NSM envisaged setting up a network of 70 high-performance computing facilities with an aim to connect national academic and R&D institutions across India over a seven-year period at an estimated cost of Rs 4500 Crores.

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 mission comes under the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
Nodal Agencies of National Supercomputing Mission is Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Under NSM, the long-term plan is to build a strong base of 20,000 skilled persons over the next five years who will be equipped to handle the complexities of supercomputers.
In 2020, a RTI reply revealed that India has produced just three supercomputers since 2015 under NSM

Currently, there are four supercomputers from India in the Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.