PM Modi Dedicates India Three Supercomputers and An HPC System for Climate Research

Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi dedicates to nation three PARAM Rudra Supercomputers via video conferencing

Inaugurates High-Performance Computing (HPC) system tailored for weather and climate research

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dedicated three PARAM Rudra supercomputers to the nation via video conferencing. These supercomputers, developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at a cost of around ₹130 crore, have been deployed in Pune, Delhi, and Kolkata.

The PARAM Rudra supercomputers are designed to facilitate advanced research in fields such as physics, earth sciences, and cosmology.

Additionally, a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system tailored for weather and climate research was also inaugurated. This initiative marks a significant step towards self-reliance in computing and driving innovation in science and technology in India.

This project represents an investment of Rs. 850 crore, marking a significant leap in India's computational capabilities for meteorological applications. Located at two key sites, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune and the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF) in Noida, this HPC system has extraordinary computing power.

The new HPC systems are named 'Arka' and 'Arunika,' reflecting their connection to the Sun. These high-resolution models will significantly enhance the accuracy and lead time of predictions related to tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, thunderstorms, hailstorms, heat waves, droughts, and other critical weather phenomena.

Addressing the occasion, the Prime Minister said that today marks a huge achievement in the field of science and technology for India and is a reflection of the nation’s progress by prioritizing research and development. “Today’s India is carving new opportunities in the endless horizon of possibilities”, the Prime Minister remarked. The Prime Minister mentioned the development of three PARAM Rudra Supercomputers by India’s scientists and their installation in Delhi, Pune and Kolkata, and also spoke about the inauguration of ‘Arka’ and ‘Arunika’, a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system tailored for weather and climate research. The Prime Minister conveyed his best wishes to the entire scientific community, engineers and all citizens.

The Prime Minister dedicated the three PARAM Rudra Supercomputers to the youth of the nation as he recalled granting 25 extra days apart from the 100 days towards youth at the onset of the third term. He underlined that these supercomputers will play a crucial role towards making such state-of-the-art technology available to young scientists in the country and highlighted its usage in aiding advanced research in the fields of physics, earth sciences and cosmology. Such sectors, the Prime Minister said, envision the future of science and technology.

IIT Hyderabad Researchers Help Find Evidence for the Humming of the Universe by Low Frequency Gravitational Waves

• IITH researchers, as part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortium, find evidence for ultra-low frequency gravitational waves
• The results could not have been possible without the NSM (National Supercomputing Mission) facility Param Seva installed at IIT Hyderabad
• Such waves are expected to originate from a large number of dancing monster black hole pairs more than a million times more massive than the Sun.
• Link to papers: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346844 and https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346842

A team of researchers from IIT Hyderabad (IITH) are part of an international team of astronomers from India, Japan, and Europe has published results from monitoring pulsars, nature’s best clocks, using six of the World's most sensitive radio telescopes, including India’s largest telescope uGMRT. These results provide a hint of evidence for the relentless vibrations of the fabric of the universe, caused by ultra-low frequency gravitational waves. Such waves are expected to originate from a large number of dancing monster black hole pairs, crores of times heavier than our Sun. The team’s results are a crucial milestone in opening a new, astrophysically-rich window in the gravitational wave spectrum.

Representative image

Such dancing monster Black Hole pairs, expected to lurk in the centres of colliding galaxies, create ripples in the fabric of our cosmos, and astronomers call them nano-hertz gravitational waves as their wavelengths can be many lakhs of crores of kilometres. The relentless cacophony of gravitational waves from a large number of supermassive black hole pairs creates a persistent humming of our universe. The team, consisting of members of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) and Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortia, published their results in two papers in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal, and their results hint at the presence of such gravitational waves in their data set. These results include an analysis of pulsar data collected over 25 years with six of the world’s largest radio telescopes.

The IITH team which took part in this discovery consists of Dr Shantanu Desai, faculty in the Department of Physics and Department of AI, Mr Aman Srivastava, Physics PhD student, Mr Divyansh Kharbanda (2023 BTech graduate in Engineering Physics), Ms Swetha Arumugam (rising BTech senior in EE). Another B Tech student in EE, Ms Pragna Mamdipaka, is also part of InPTA and is playing an active role in ongoing InPTA efforts. IITH has been part of InPTA since 2018, and some of the past InPTA students from IITH are pursuing higher studies in Astrophysics and related industries.

Emphasizing the importance of this result and IITH’s contribution, Prof B S Murty, Director, IITH, said, “Congratulations to the InPTA collaboration and the IITH team involved in this discovery. I am delighted that the state-of-the-art NSM Param Seva computing facility at IITH has helped to create these path-breaking results. This achievement also underscores the power of collaboration in attaining scientific benchmarking results’’.

“I am elated that IITH students from both Physics and Electrical Engineering could be part of this historical discovery. These results are due to many years of painstaking efforts from many scientists. I am grateful for the support received from IITH. In particular, the results could not have been possible without the NSM (National Supercomputing Mission) facility Param Seva installed at IIT Hyderabad’’, said Prof Shantanu Desai, IITH.

The InPTA experiment involves researchers from NCRA (Pune), TIFR (Mumbai), IIT (Roorkee), IISER (Bhopal), IIT (Hyderabad), IMSc (Chennai) and RRI (Bengaluru) along with colleagues from Kumamoto University, Japan. More details about InPTA can be found at https://inpta.iitr.ac.in/

This combined IPTA data set is expected to be more sensitive, and scientists are excited about the constraints they can place on the GWB (Gravitational Wave Background) along with understanding various other phenomena that may have taken place when the Universe was in its infancy, just a few seconds old, which can also produce gravitational waves at these astronomically long wavelengths.

"PARAM ANANTA", the 15th Made in India Supercomputer Under NSM Commissioned At IIT Gandhinagar

PARAM ANANTA, a state-of the art Made-in-India Supercomputer of 838 TeraFlops capacity has been dedicated to the nation today, under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) — a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

"Ananta", the name of the supercomputer, literally means ‘endless’ or ‘limitless’. The logo design symbolises the Sudarshan Chakra in the form of the Sun along with data grid mountains merging in perspective with the limitless horizon.

The new facility will provide a tremendous amount of computational power to the scientific community of IITGN as well as the academic institutions and industries in the vicinity of the Institute to take their Research and Development (R&D) efforts to a global scale: IITGN pic.twitter.com/NBykv7T7h2

— DeshGujarat (@DeshGujarat) May 30, 2022

The supercomputer, which is 15th supercomputer under NSM till date, was commissioned at Indian Institute of Technology - Gandhinagar (IIT Gandhinagar) by Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator & Scientist 'G', Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Prof. Amit Prashant, officiating Director, IIT Gandhinagar.

A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM. Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this Supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.

Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers are completely Made in India.

PARAM ANANTA supercomputing facility is established under Phase-2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this 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.

Prior to this, a Petascale Supercomputer "PARAM Shakti" at IIT Kharagpur, was unveiled in March this year. Earlier in year 2020, the government has announced a 100 Artificial Intelligence (AI) PetaFlops supercomputing system, PARAM Siddhi – AI, created and installed in C-DAC facility by NVIDIA.

PARAM ANANTA is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage and high performance Infiniband interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

The 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. This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.

PARAM ANANTA Supercomputing Facility will be of great benefit to IIT Gandhinagar to pursue the Research and Development (R&D) activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology at the Institute, including, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); Bio-engineering for Genome Sequencing and DNA studies; Computational Biology and Bioinformatics used in prediction and detection of gene networks; Atomic & Molecular Sciences that helps in understanding how a drug binds to a particular protein.

Besides, the supercomputing facility will also be beneficial for studies & research in Climate Change and Environment studies for extreme weather predictions and simulation of models which can predict the onset of a cyclone;  Energy studies which will help in carrying out design simulation and optimization of energy conversion devices at various scales; Fire Dynamics Simulation; Nanotechnology; Robotics; Applied mathematics; Astronomy and Astrophysics; Material Sciences; Quantum Mechanics; Studies on Civil Engineering and structural mechanics to understand the dynamic behaviour of buildings, bridges; and complex structure.