The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bengaluru, Karnataka has set up one of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers. The Param Pravega is the largest in an Indian academic institution.
Param Pravega was commission under the National Supercomputing Mission that is spearhead by the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
Param Parvega sports a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops.
To put things in perspective, one petaflop equals quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) or a thousand teraflops.
The supercomputer has been design by the Centre for Development of Advance Computing.
Many of the components deploy into the supercomputer have actually made in India.
Even the software stack that it runs on has been indigenously develop by C-DAC.
Powering the supercomputer include Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and Nvidia’s Tesla V100 cards for the GPU nodes.
The machine features an array of program development tools, utilities and libraries that are helpful in developing and executing High-Performance-Computing applications.
The National Supercomputing Missions has been implement by C-DAC and IISc.
Param Pravega has back the deployment of 10 other supercomputers across the nation, seen in institutions such as IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR and NABI-Mohali, resulting in cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops!
What are Param Pravega Use for?
Supercomputers like Param Parvega have help students and faculty members conduct R&D activities including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, understanding environmental issues in the urban areas, setting up flood warning and prediction systems while also helping in optimising telecom networks.
Param Pravega isn’t the first supercomputer at IISc.
Before Param Parvega, it had SahasraT in 2015, which was, for the time, the fastest supercomputer in the country.
Faculty members have use SahasraT for research on COVID-19, looking at modelling viral entry, binding, studying interactions of proteins etc.
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has announce that it has commission Param Pravega– it’s latest supercomputer under the the National Supercomputing Mission.
Also claim to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, IISc also said that it is the “largest in an Indian academic institution”.
IISc said that the Param Pravega supercomputer comes with a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second).
Param Pravega supercomputer will be use for research purposes.
Specifications of Param Pravega
The Param Pravega supercomputer has a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes.
Indian Institute of Science Said in a statement :
“The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops. The software stack on top of the hardware is provided and supported by C-DAC. The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications,”.
The Param Pravega supercomputer is said to have 11 DCLC racks of compute nodes, 2 Service racks of Master/Service nodes, and 4 Storage racks of DDN storage.
Indian Institute of Science Said :
“The node configuration includes 2 Master nodes, 11 Login nodes, 2 Firewall nodes, 4 Management, 1 NIS Slave and 624 (CPU+GPU) compute nodes. The compute nodes are of three categories, namely, Regular CPU, High-memory CPU, and GPU nodes,”.
All the nodes in the system are connect using Mellanox high-speed HDR-Infiniband interconnection network using a FAT-tree topology with a 1:1 subscription ratio.
Indian Institute of Science Said :
“The system is also augmented with a 4 Petabyte parallel storage from DDN for parallel file system access,”.
Param Pravega Software
Param Pravega is said to be built to operate using Linux OS based on CentOS 7.x distribution.
As per the Statement :
“The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for ease of development and execution of HPC applications on the heterogeneous hardware of the machine. Common compilers from GNU and Intel are accessible on the system for MPI and OpenMP parallel libraries. For use on the GPU nodes the system has CUDA and OpenACC SDKs installed,”.
Indian Institute of Science Also has SahasraT Supercomputer
In 2015, IISc install SahasraT, which was at that time the fastest supercomputer in the country.
Explaining the use cases, IISc said that its faculty members and students have been using the supercomputing facility to carry out research on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases among many other topics like climate change, flight vehicles, etc.
The new Param Pravega supercomputer is said to boost prowess further.
Who Made the Param Pravega Supercomputer?
The Param Pravega supercomputer has been design by the Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC).
A majority of the components use to build this system have been manufactur and assemble within India, with an indigenous software stack develop by C-DAC.
The National Supercomputing Mission is man by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implement by C-DAC and IISc.
