Relevance: GS-3: Science and Technology- Developments and their Applications and Effects in Everyday Life. Achievements of Indians in Science & Technology; Indigenization of Technology and Developing New Technology.
Key Phrases: Supercomputer, Centre for Development Of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Floating-Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), National Knowledge Network (NKN), High-Performance Computing, Parallel Computers
Why in News?
- Param Ganga - a made-in-India Petascale supercomputer has been deployed at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, according to an ANI report. The supercomputer is capable of supercomputing at 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations Per Second). The supercomputer has been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under the guidance of the National Supercomputing Mission.
Background:
What is a Supercomputer?
- A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance
compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer
is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead
of million instructions per second (MIPS).
- Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second.
- Supercomputers are used for data-intensive and computation-heavy scientific and engineering purposes such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modelling, physical simulations, aerodynamics, nuclear fusion research and cryptanalysis.
India emerging a leader in supercomputing:
- India is fast emerging as a leader in high power computing with the
National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) boosting it to meet the increasing
computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and start-ups in
areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics and drug
discovery.
- The supercomputer infrastructure installed at various Institutes across the country have helped the R&D community to achieve major milestones, objectives and products for scientific and societal applications.
About PARAM Ganga:
- NSM has now deployed “PARAM Ganga”, a supercomputer at
IIT Roorkee, with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.
- The system is designed and commissioned by C-DAC under Phase 2 of the build approach of the NSM.
- Substantial components utilized to build this system are manufactured and assembled within India along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, which is a step towards the Make in India initiative of the Government.
- Availability of such a supercomputer will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering with a focus to provide computational power to the user community of IIT Roorkee and neighbouring academic institutions.
The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):
The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.
- The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic
and research institutions across the country. Part of this is being
imported from abroad and part built indigenously.
- The Mission envisages empowering national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
- The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
- PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.
- The National Supercomputing Mission in its three phases plans to
increase India’s supercomputing capability to 45 petaflops, which would
include three systems with 3 petaflops capability and one system with 20
petaflops capability.
- Petaflops is a measure of computing capability of adding at least a quadrillion (1,000 trillion) real numbers in a second. That computer speed is equivalent to 5,000-6,000 high-end laptops working together.
- The Four major pillars of the NSM are:
- Infrastructure
- Applications
- Research & Development
- Human Resource Development
- All four pillars have been functioning efficiently to realize the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.
- C-DAC has been entrusted with the responsibility to design,
develop, deploy and commission the supercomputing systems under the build
approach of Mission. The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities
with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops.
- Under the build approach, C-DAC is building an indigenous supercomputing ecosystem in a phased manner, which is leading to indigenously designed and manufactured supercomputers. It has designed and developed a computer server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.
Clearing concept: Supercomputing, HPC and parallel computing
- While supercomputing typically refers to the process of complex and large calculations used by supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) is the use of multiple supercomputers to process complex and large calculations. Both terms are often used interchangeably.
- Supercomputers are sometimes called parallel computers
because supercomputing can use parallel processing. Parallel processing
is when multiple CPUs work on solving a single calculation at a given
time. However, HPC scenarios use parallelism, too, without using a
supercomputer necessarily.
- Another exception is that supercomputers could use other processor systems, like vector processors, scalar processors or multithreaded processors.
- Quantum computing is a computing model that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to process data, performing computations based on probabilities. It aims to solve complex problems the world's most powerful supercomputers can't solve and never will.
Large-scale applications of NSM:
- NSM Platform for Genomics and Drug Discovery.
- Urban Modelling: Science Based Decision Support Framework to Address Urban Environment Issues (Meteorology, Hydrology, Air Quality).
- Flood Early Warning and Prediction System for River Basins of India.
- HPC Software Suite for Seismic Imaging to aid Oil and Gas Exploration.
- MPPLAB: Telecom Network Optimization.
As the infrastructure planned in NSM phase I has already been installed and much of Phase II is in place, the speed of supercomputers in the country will soon reach to around 16 PF, the DST said.
Conclusion:
- Supercomputing enables problem solving and data analysis that would be simply impossible, too time-consuming or costly with standard computers, e.g., fluid dynamics calculations. Today, big data presents a compelling use case. A supercomputer can discover insights in vast troves of otherwise impenetrable information.
Sources: PIB
Mains Question:
Q. Explain how India is fast emerging a leader in high power computing with the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). And also discuss the benefits of supercomputing in Indian context. [250 words].
