Supercomputer centres to boost research on technical, societal sectors

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has been setting up supercomputing centres in technical institutions to boost research and development in manufacturing, defence, power, agriculture, communications, climate change, drugs innovation, and early warning for natural calamities, an official said here on Wednesday.

The C-DAC, a premier organisation of the union Communications and Information Technology Ministry, has been setting up PARAM Shavak supercomputing centres in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NIT) across the country to provide a tabletop form of the world's most compact supercomputer.

C-DAC's executive director Hemant Darbari said : "PARAM Supercomputing infrastructure would enable the institute to begin and pursue interdisciplinary research in all societal sectors of the economy by modern computational research methodologies where the focus would be on accuracy with a clear purpose for decision making."

"This supercomputer would be used as a tool for carrying out modelling, simulation and data analysis (of modern R and D methodologies) in multiple science and engineering domains. Research scholars and students can obtain fast modelling and simulations results of real life complex problem statements of their research in diverse field of applications," he told reporters.

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar has inaugurated a supercomputer centre in NIT, Agartala on Wednesday. The centre, which set up in collaboration with C-DAC spending Rs.48 lakh, was second of its kind in the northeastern states after Guwahati.

Darbari said supercomputers are key to new reforms in all societal sectors of the economy from manufacturing, defence, power, agriculture, communications, engineering sciences, banking, seismic sciences, weather and climate prediction, biotechnology, drug discovery, early warning for natural calamities, key data analysis, life sciences, data mining among others.

He said this initiative is expected to create a skilled work force and promote research by integrating emerging technologies at the grassroots level.

"Supercomputing has become the new paradigm for growth and development across the world. Today, with the progress of technology, supercomputing, which had earlier been an elite technology, is now readily available for the common user, thereby multiplying its potential benefits without the high costs of investment.

"PARAM Shavak is an offspring of this thought process and is our answer to break though the elitist tag of supercomputing," the director added.

NIT Agartala director Gopal Mugeraya, said that creation of supercomputing infrastructure shall facilitate multi-disciplinary engineering research using high performance computing techniques, enabling technologies, capacity and capability building, high end computational research and innovation.

"This supercomputer centre would help achieve excellence in engineering education and research in and on the northeastern region. This would also invite research collaboration with neighbouring nations," Mugeraya added.

Co-ordinator of C-DAC Centre of Excellence in NIT Agartala, Nirmalya Kar said that this high performance computing infrastructure is the beginning and can also be used by the researchers in the state of Tripura with increased computing power.