Supercomputer PARAM Ananta commissioned at IIT Gandhinagar

PARAM Ananta, a supercomputing facility under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), was commissioned at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) on May 30.

The new facility is set to provide computational power to the scientific community of IITGN as well as the academic institutions and industries in the vicinity of the institute. It will help them take their R&D efforts to a global scale. Sunita Verma, group coordinator and scientist G, MeitY, commissioned the facility in the presence of Amit Prashant, professor and officiating director, IITGN; Hemant Darbari, mission director- NSM; Col A K Nath (Retd), executive director (Corporate Strategy), C-DAC Pune; Namrata Pathak, associate head/scientist F, DST; Naveen Kumar, scientist D, MeitY; Sanjay Wandhekar, senior director & convenor NSM; Prashant Dinde, associate director, C-DAC; B S V Ramesh, joint director & co-ordinator for PARAM Ananta; along with senior officials from MeitY, DST, C-DAC, and IITGN.

The logo of PARAM Ananta symbolises the Sudarshan Chakra in the form of the sun along with data grid mountains merging in perspective with the limitless horizon. The 838 teraflops (TF) supercomputing system is powered with 7400 CPU cores, 52TB RAM, 1PiB of storage space, and an enormous power of GPU nodes along with the usual software stack required to run high-end simulations.

Speaking on the occasion, Sunita Verma said, "We are confident that this computing power will be used to come up with new applications in diverse areas of research for the benefit of society."

Amit Prashant said, “It’s a pleasure to share the passion in building and commissioning this facility that will have a far-reaching positive impact on our society."