IAS Current affairs - Param Pravega Supercomputer

Param Pravega Supercomputer

 

Context:

  • The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega, one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
  • The system is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits. It has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion, or 1015 operations per second).

 

 

About:

  • 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, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
  • NSM is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
  • The Mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc., in IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.
  • About 31,00,000 computational jobs have successfully been carried out by around 2,600 researchers till date.
  • These systems have greatly helped faculty members and students carry out major R&D activities, including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, establishing flood warning and prediction systems, and optimizing telecom networks.

 

 

About the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):

 

  • Launch: NSM was announced in 2015, with an aim to connect national academic and R&D institutions with a grid of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities at an estimated cost of Rs. 4,500 crores over the period of seven years by 2022.
  • It supports the government’s vision of ‘Digital India and ‘Make in India’.
  • Implementation: NSM is jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST – Ministry of Science and Technology) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Source: THE HINDU.