PARAM Shakti, a Petascale Supercomputer at IIT Kharagpur, has been inaugurated under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) which will help researchers solve large-scale problems in various fields of science and engineering.

Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS).

The supercomputer was inaugurated on March 27 by West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar in the presence of Prof V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of the art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs.

This facility has pioneered in using RDHX based efficient cooling system to obtain a high power usage effectiveness. This system has been tested extensively by both IIT Kharagpur and CDAC for commercial, open-source and in-house software pertaining to diversified applications.

The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering. Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing based research will be of great value addition are: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities and Smart Materials.

IIT Kharagpur is also one of the NSM nodal centres for training in HPC and AI and working on development manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation.

IIT Kharagpur has also established the Centre for Computational and Data Science with a mandate to train the researchers in Supercomputer accelerated R&D.

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