In a bid to boost the research environment and capability in Northeast, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has signed a pact with the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to set up 650 TF Supercomputing Facility.
As a part of the agreement, a Rs 17-crore worth of 650 TF Supercomputing Facility under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) will be set up at the institute.
The IIT-G signed a MoU with the Pune based Centre for a period of five years.
This system will consist of 10 master/service nodes, 107 CPU only compute nodes, 10 GPU nodes and 39 High Memory CPU only compute nodes.
The MoU was signed by Prof TG Sitharam, Director of IIT-Guwahati, and Dr Hemant Darbari, Director General of C-DAC, during a virtual event in the presence of Sanjay Dhotre, Union Minister of State for Education, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology.
Using the supercomputing facility, IIT-Guwahati will focus on quantum turbulence, instabilities and turbulence in thermal convection, super cooled liquid and glasses, reactivity of high-valent metal intermediates, computational study of polymer-composites, membranes, poly electrolytes, granular flows, clinical text mining, machine learning and its application in computational biology, deep learning, and Computational Social Systems areas of research.
The 650 TF supercomputer at IIT-Guwahati will play an important role in the field of scientific and engineering applications, such as quantum mechanics, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modelling, weather forecasting, spacecraft aerodynamics, computational systems biology and detonation simulations, including the handling of large data bases using Artificial Intelligence models.
Speaking about the future plans, Prof Sitharam said, “The Computer and Communication Centre of our institute is already equipped with Param Ishan, the 250 TF supercomputer that we have had for four years now. The Centre will also house the new supercomputer.
“IIT-Guwahati plans to turn this Computer and Communication Centre into an Academic Centre. It will amalgamate with the newly-planned Department of Data Sciences and Knowledge Engineering. About 80 faculty members and 600 students of IIT-Guwahati are active users of Param Ishan and are eagerly waiting for the new system to become available,” he said.
IIT-Guwahati will organise training courses to popularize the use and applications of supercomputers in Northeast and other major missions of the Central government.