IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC to set up India’s First 1.3 PetaFlop HPC Facility and Data Centre under National Supercomputing Mission
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High-Performance Computation based R&D in India is going to witness a new phase with the setting up of India’s first state-of-the-art 1.3 PetaFlop High-Performance Computing facility and datacenter ecosystem at IIT Kharagpur under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The Institute signed an MoU with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), an autonomous Scientific Society of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India on March 12. 2019 towards this effect. C-DAC would facilitate supply, installation, commissioning and operations of state-of-the-art HPC facility along with Data Center ecosystem at IIT Kharagpur funded under the NSM project.
The initiative will be undertaken at the Centre for Computational and Data Sciences at IIT Kharagpur. Facilitation will be provided for large-scale computational support to the researchers, who are engaged in research activities in diverse areas of national importance. This facility will accelerate and evolve the level of research currently being done with manifold improvement in output and efficiency.
“IIT Kharagpur has selected specific challenge domains including cryptography, chemistry, molecular dynamics, drug discovery, AI & Data Sciences, etc. We have also identified the challenges in these domains and the applications in areas such as healthcare, smart cities, geosciences, new materials and other discovery based sciences,” said Prof. P P Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur.
“The facility is expected to come up in the next 3-4 months with the work to be carried in three concurrent phases of assembling, assembling and manufacturing and thirdly design and manufacturing with all products and accessories indigenously designed and manufactured in India”, confirmed Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC.
Dr. Darbari, remarked on the growing importance of high performance computing in newer research areas in cancer, data protection etc. which would be of significant. As the scope of HPC is expanding, such facilities as the one being built at IIT Kharagpur will become a core factor in various research domains with the coming of a large variety of HPC applications for use by researchers at all levels.
IIT Kharagpur will also be offering high quality academic programs and capacity building in manpower in the area of HPC. “The Institute will conduct degree programs such as M.Tech., PG diploma, doctoral programs as well microspecializations for undergraduate students and short-term courses for industry professionals and students outside IIT Kharagpur,” added Prof. Chakrabarti.
Two ministries of the Govt. of India are involved in this initiative, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology and top experts from NITI Aayog, MHRD, DRDO, IISc, IITs and many more applications can be developed from nation’s perspective.
The research activities will include building hardware and software for High Performance Computing systems, Data Management, Analytics, Visualizations, etc, along with promoting cutting-edge research in different HPC application domains that include but are not limited to Computational Biology, Drug Design, Atmospheric Modeling, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Geo-Scientific Computations, Modeling and Mining of Heterogeneous Information Network, Multi-scale Modeling of Novel Materials, Computational Chemistry, Computational Physics, Cryptanalysis, Numerical Mathematics, Computational Mechanics, Non-equilibrium Molecular Dynamics, etc.
Photo Credit: Suman Sutradhar
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