IIT-Kharagpur receives first supercomputing facility under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, is the first academic institution to get a supercomputing facility under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). This will provide large computational support to users to carry out both research and teaching activities that
involve state-of-the-art High Performance Computing (HPC) and usher in a new age in research and innovation in the country, an IIT-Kharagpur spokesperson said.

IIT-KGP Director Prof P P Chakrabarti said "The Peta-Flop new system with both CPU and CPU-GPU based servers along with the already existing HPC equipment will provide about 1.5 Peta-Flop capacity support to several areas where the researchers of IIT-KGP are actively involved."
    
The Institute is setting up a new Centre for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) around such a supercomputing platform to build, manage and operate the HPC facility, he said.
    
Referring to the research areas where the facility will be of use, Prof Chakrabarti said "Faculty members and their research groups at IIT-KGP are already engaged in research in several areas of national importance requiring large computational (both hardware and software) support.

High performance computers of interest to small and medium-sized businesses today are really clusters of computers. Each individual computer in a commonly configured small cluster has between one and four processors, and today’s processors typically have from two to four cores. HPC people often refer to the individual computers in a cluster as nodes. A cluster of interest to a small business could have as few as four nodes, or 16 cores. A common cluster size in many businesses is between 16 and 64 nodes, or from 64 to 256 cores.

High Performance Computing you have all of the elements you’d find on your desktop — processors, memory, disk, operating system — just more of them.

"The facility will cover cutting-edge research scope in different inter-disciplinary areas like bio molecular simulations, drug design and bio-informatics, climate change and digital earth, geo-scientific exploration, infrastructure design and sustainable cities," he said.
    
"Other than research, CCDS will also focus on education and capacity building," Prof Chakrabarti said adding, IIT-KGP had been chosen as a nodal centre for HPC-related educational activities by NSM.
     
The objective of NSM is to achieve a self-reliant supercomputing platform in the country and to develop and expand the scope of using HPC systems to solve complex problems of national importance in different fields of science and technology, he said.
     
The initiative is supported by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the mission envisages building supercomputing capacity and capability in the country with an estimated budget of Rs 4,500 crore over a period of seven years, he said.

A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, a petaflop can be measured as one thousand teraflops.

               *A petaflop computer requires a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem.

               *Applications might include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery or even astrophysical simulation.

               *Today's fastest parallel computing operations are capable of petaflop speeds. The world's fastest supercomputer today, Titan, is capable of 20 petaflops.