Param Pravega, a supercomputer that is touted to be one of the most powerful in the country, has been installed at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the premiere academic establishment said in a statement on Thursday.
According to IISc, Param Pravega has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1,015 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 the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC in line with the Make in India initiative,” the statement stated.
India has come a long way in developing its own systems after the US denied the sale of a supercomputer to India in the mid-1980s which was likely to be used for predicting weather. This led to the government of India setting up C-CDAC in 1988 with its first mission to deliver computer power exceeding 1,000 mflops (1 GigaFlops). In July 1991, with a mission effort of more than 300-man years, PARAM800 was delivered.