S. Vishnu Sharma
IIT Guwahati to install super computing facility – IIT Guwahati will be soon be installing a super computing facility of Compute Power of 650 TF on its premises. Sources confirmed that Technical Advisory Committee of National Supercomputing Mission (MSM-TAC) has also given its approval in this regard.
The power of 650 TF is approximately said to be having 838TF Peak, 70:30 CPU and GPU Hybrid Super computing system. A supercomputer is a computer that has very high speed in its operation and higher memory.
IIT Guwahati to install super computing facility
This super computing system can perform assigned tasks including multiple tasks at very high speeds than any other normal personal computer (PC) and in many cases are able to operate at speeds that are millions of times faster than ordinary PCs.
IIT Guwahati to install super computing facility
The installation of this super computing system at IITGuwahati has been initiated under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) are coordinating the mission and the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, are the implementing agencies for this mission.
C-DAC, Pune, will install the Supercomputing facility using the build approach of NSM in IIT Guwahati, which will provide necessary Data Centre space, power with back up, cooling, etc. for the facility.
This new hybrid Supercomputing system will not only boost the HPC usages and research environment in the Institute but also enhance the research capability of the Northeast region since around 40% of the compute power will be allocated to the external users as per the guidelines approved by the NSM-TAC.
This is also aligns with the policy of IIT Guwahati to build a ‘Network of Excellence’ among the institutes of northeastern region.
IITGuwahati director Dr. T.G. Sitharam said “New Supercomputer at IIT Guwahati with 650 TFLOPS is more powerful and a technologically superior facility, which will play an important role in the field of scientific and engineering applications such as quantum mechanics.
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It will play an important role even in climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modelling, weather forecasting, spacecraft aerodynamics, computational systems biology and detonation simulations including the handling of large databases using Artificial intelligence models.
IIT Guwahati has a large HPC user base already involved in solving many crucial problems that require more computational resources than that provided by using the existing 250 TFlops Param Ishan super computer at our computer center, he said.
IIT Guwahati will organize training courses to popularise the use and applications of supercomputers in the north eastern region and other major missions of the Government of India.
They are also planning to link this facility with our their interdisciplinary master programme on data sciences jointly initiated by EEE, CSE and Mathematics departments, he said.
It is interesting to note that IITGuwahati has been connected with dual redundant NKN connectivity with 10Gbps bandwidth and already has another supercomputer ‘PARAM-ISHAN’ of 250TF computing
power.
This was inaugurated by then Minister of Human Resource and Development Prakash Javadekar on 19 September 2016. This facility has been extensively used by the faculty and researchers of the Institute to solve complex problems.
IIT Guwahati to install super computing facility – Complex problems are related to the the field of Chemical Engineering, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Biotechnology, Quantum High Energy Physics, Cosmology, Molecular Dynamics, Nanotechnology and Environment. Software like GROMACS, NAMD, WRF, LAMPPS, COMSOL, Ansys, OPENFOAM, GERRIS etc are available in the system for various uses.
The same institution was active partner in partner for the GARUDA Grid Computing project, India’s national grid computing initiative, a CDAC programme funded by the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to deploy a distributed networked infrastructure for universities, research laboratories, industry and government throughout India.