Focus: GS III- Science and Technology
Why in News?
PARAM PORUL, a state-of-the art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was inaugurated.
Features of PARAM PORUL
- PARAM PORUL system is equipped with a mix of CPU (Central Processing Unit) nodes, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage and high-performance InfiniBand interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.
- This system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high-power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
- Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.
What is National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)?
- The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
- The mission will nationally coordinate collaborative programme involving developers and users of supercomputing systems as well as academic and research institutions.
- It looks to facilitate effective governance and monitoring mechanisms to build culture of supercomputing for solving complex R&D problems and designing solutions addressing various country specific requirements for scientific, strategic and societal applications.
- The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
- These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN).
- The NKN is a central government initiative which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high-speed network.
- Under NSM, the long-term plan is to build a strong base of 20,000 skilled persons.
- The mission will be implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (Ministry of Science and Technology) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
