PARAM Shivay

PARAM Shivay. It is the first supercomputer commissioned under the National Supercomputing Mission and was installed at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. The system, built by Netweb Technologies based on design expertise from the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, serves as a pivotal high-performance computing resource for academic and industrial research across northern India.

Overview

PARAM Shivay represents a foundational pillar of India's strategic National Supercomputing Mission, a joint initiative spearheaded by the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Its installation at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi marked a significant milestone in decentralizing advanced computational power within the country's academic landscape. The system is part of the broader PARAM series of supercomputers, which are indigenously developed and assembled, reinforcing national efforts in technological self-reliance. Named after the epithet for Lord Shiva, associated with the city of Varanasi, it symbolizes a confluence of advanced science and cultural heritage.

Specifications

The system achieves a peak performance of 833.0 TeraFLOPS, a metric that earned it the 120th position on the prestigious international TOP500 list in November 2019. It is powered by a hybrid architecture combining Intel Xeon CPUs and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, specifically utilizing NVIDIA Tesla series processors for parallel computing tasks. PARAM Shivay is equipped with 393 TB of primary memory and incorporates a high-speed InfiniBand interconnect fabric to facilitate efficient data transfer between nodes. For storage, it employs a parallel file system offering 1.7 PB of capacity, managed by the Ubuntu (operating system) and supported by a suite of development tools including the GNU Compiler Collection and the OpenMP API.

Development and Deployment

The development was led by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India's premier research and development organization in supercomputing, under the overarching framework of the National Supercomputing Mission. The hardware assembly and integration were carried out by the Indian firm Netweb Technologies, showcasing a successful public-private partnership model. After rigorous testing and benchmarking at C-DAC facilities, the system was formally inaugurated in 2019 by then Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Its deployment at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi was strategically chosen to catalyze research in the Indo-Gangetic plain region, providing computational resources to a consortium of academic institutions and industries.

Applications and Impact

PARAM Shivay supports a wide spectrum of computational research, enabling complex simulations in fields such as computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, climate modeling, and seismic analysis. Researchers utilize it for advanced projects in drug discovery, genomics, artificial intelligence, and materials science, significantly accelerating time-to-discovery for Indian scientists. The supercomputer has fostered numerous collaborations with institutions like the Banaras Hindu University, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and various Defence Research and Development Organisation laboratories. By providing state-of-the-art high-performance computing infrastructure, it plays a crucial role in building indigenous capacity, training a skilled workforce, and advancing the Make in India initiative in the technology sector. Category:Supercomputers Category:Science and technology in India Category:Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi