Param Porul supercomputer inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli to facilitate computational research

A supercomputer named Param Porul was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) on Wednesday. The NSM is a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

Param Porul supercomputing facility is established under phase two of national supercomputing mission to facilitate computational research.

According to an official statement, 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 the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

It further noted that the Param Porul is based on direct contact liquid cooling technology to obtain a high-power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost. Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between NIT Tiruchirappalli and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) on 12 October 2020 to establish this 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility under NSM.  

The NSM aims to empower the national academic and R&D institutions by installing a supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities for solving computationally intensive problems.

“A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM. Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem,” it said.

Under the NSM, a total of 15 supercomputers have been installed across the country with compute capacity of 24 petaflops, the statement further read.

All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating with indigenously developed software stack, it said.