Part of: Prelims and GS-III -Science and technology
Context: The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega.
Key takeaways
It is one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
The system is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits. It has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1015 operations per second).
It has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
A majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within India.
What is the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)?
The mission was announced in 2015.
NSM envisaged setting up a network of 70 high-performance computing facilities with an aim to connect national academic and R&D institutions across India over a seven-year period at an estimated cost of Rs 4500 Crores.
Parent Body: Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
Nodal Agencies of NSM– Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Under NSM, the long-term plan is to build a strong base of 20,000 skilled persons over the next five years who will be equipped to handle the complexities of supercomputers.
In 2020, a RTI reply revealed that India has produced just three supercomputers since 2015 under NSM
PARAM Shivay installed in IIT-BHU, Varanasi with 837 TeraFlop capacity
Second one at IIT-Kharagpur with 1.66 PetaFlop capacity
PARAM Brahma at ISER-Pune, has a capacity of 797 TeraFlop
