Supercomputer unveiled at IIT Karagpur to aid research and development activities

West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar recently inaugurated petascale supercomputer PARAM Shakti as part of the National Supercomputing Mission  at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.

The supercomputer will help researchers solve large-scale problems in various fields of science and engineering. Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating-point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS).

The NSM is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in 2019 to establish this state-of-the-art Supercomputing Facility.

Focus areas in which this supercomputing-based research can be of great value addition are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Fluid Dynamics,  Big Data Analytics, Computational Biology, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Cryptography & Security, and Smart Materials.
IIT-Kharagpur in a statement said the PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility will be fuelling R&D activities in multi-disciplinary domains of computational and data sciences.

Dhankar in this regard said the research will determine the development trajectory of a nation. Its aim is to give back to society and not the scale that matters more.

The governor also visited the Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge System at IIT Kharagpur.

Dhankhar felicitated notable alumni Vinod Gupta with Honoris Causa (Doctor of Science)-2020, Ashoke Deysarkar with Life Fellow Award-2021, and Prof Kalyan Chakravarti with Distinguished Alumnus Award-2020.