PARAM PORUL Supercomputer Unveiled at NIT, Tiruchirappalli

PARAM PORUL, a state-of-the-art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), was inaugurated on May 25, 2022 by Bhaskar Bhat, Chairperson Board of Governors, Tiruchirappalli, in the gracious presence of Prof. Under Phase 2 of the NSM, the PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established.

In accordance with the Make in India initiative, the majority of the components used to build this system were manufactured and assembled in India, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC.

On October 12, 2020, NIT Tiruchirappalli and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish this 838 TeraFlops Supercomputing Facility under NSM.

To meet the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications, the system is outfitted with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband interconnect. The PARAM PORUL system uses Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to achieve high power usage effectiveness while lowering operational costs.

For the benefit of researchers, multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and so on have been installed on the system. This high-end computing system will be a significant asset to the research community.

NIT Tiruchirappalli has been conducting research in societally important areas such as Health, Agriculture, Weather, and Financial Services. The NSM facility will help to strengthen this research. The new high-performance computational facility will help researchers solve large-scale problems in Science and Engineering.

According to the NSM mandate, a portion of the total compute power will also be shared with nearby academic and research institutes. Furthermore, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects involving researchers from and other Indian institutes and industries using this Supercomputing facility.

Overall, this supercomputing facility will provide a significant boost to research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industry, helping them to achieve global esteem. Currently, 15 supercomputers with a compute capacity of 24 petaflops have been installed across the country as part of NSM. All of these supercomputers were built in India and run on software that was developed in-house.