IISC Bengaluru installs one of India’s most powerful supercomputers

Indian Institute of Science has installed one of India’s most powerful supercomputers, Param Pravega, in its campus. It is one of the largest supercomputers ever installed at an Indian academic institution under the National Supercomputing Mission. The supercomputer will be used for research and educational purposes. Param Pravega has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops.

Param Pravega was designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and most of the components used to build it has been manufactured and assembled in India using a homegrown software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.

The Param Pravega system at IISc is a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes. The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops. The software stack on top of the hardware is provided and supported by C-DAC. The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

Under the National Supercomputing Mission, 10 supercomputers have been deployed at  IISc, 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 across the country to date.