IISc commissions Param Pravega, one of India’s most powerful supercomputers

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore has installed and commissioned Param Pravega, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, the institute informed on Thursday.

Designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the system, which is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits, has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second).

A majority of the components used to build the system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative, the institute said.

The system has been installed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), which has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc, IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops.

Param Pravega system at IISc
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.

The institute already has a cutting-edge supercomputing facility established several years ago. In 2015, the Institute procured and installed SahasraT, which was at that time the fastest supercomputer in the country. Livemint