Param Ananta, is a state of the art supercomputer at IIT Gandhinagar dedicated to the nation under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). It is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), which was commissioned. This indigenous software stack is developed by C-DAC and is a Make in India initiative.
About the MoU:
- A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Gandhinagar and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on October 12, 2020, to establish this 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility under NSM.
- The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, high memory nodes, high throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband interconnect to cater to the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
About the Param Ananta:
- The Param Ananta is based on direct contact liquid cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reduce the operational cost.
- The Param Ananta Supercomputing Facility will greatly benefit IIT Gandhinagar’s R&D activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology, including, but not limited to, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); bio-engineering for genome sequencing and DNA studies.
- Computational biology and bioinformatics are used in the prediction and detection of gene networks; atomic and molecular sciences that help in understanding how a drug binds to a particular protein; climate change and environment studies for extreme weather predictions and simulation of models which can predict the onset of a cyclone;
- Energy studies which will help in carrying out design simulation and optimization of energy conversion devices at various scales; fire dynamics simulation; nanotechnology; robotics; applied mathematics; astronomy and astrophysics; material sciences; quantum mechanics; and studies on civil engineering and structural mechanics to understand the dynamic behaviour of buildings, bridges, and complex structure.