C-DAC, IIT Gandhinagar unveil Param Ananta, India's latest supercomputer

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar have jointly unveiled a new supercomputer in phase two of the central government’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). Called Param Ananta, the supercomputer is capable of offering peak performance of 838 teraflops.

Sanctioned in October 2020, Param Ananta will offer IIT Gandhinagar with increased capacity for research projects in various fields, including machine learning, data science, computational fluid dynamics, bioengineering and more.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), the supercomputer has a mixed set of CPU and GPU nodes, along with high throughput storage and high bandwidth memory modules. It is also said to offer direct contact liquid cooling technology to increase performance efficiency, although it is not clear as to what performance per watt does it offer.

The supercomputer will rank behind C-DAC’s Param Siddhi-AI, which as of November 2021 was the 102nd most powerful supercomputer in the world — with peak performance capability of 3.3 petaflops.

With Param Ananta, India now has 15 supercomputers disclosed to the public, with combined performance capability of 24 petaflops.

The announcement interestingly comes on the same day when USA’s Frontier supercomputer, run by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, was officially ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world. The latter outperformed Fugaku, now the second most powerful supercomputer and operated by Japan’s Riken Centre for Computational Science, to take the top spot.

Frontier has been labelled as the world’s first ‘true’ exascale supercomputer, capable of producing overall computing power in multiple exaflops. In direct comparison, C-DAC and IIT Gandhinagar’s latest Param Ananta supercomputer offers a fraction of the net performance capability that the world’s most powerful publicly known supercomputer can produce today.

The official list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers will be published in Hamburg, Germany on June 1.