PARAM SHANKH-‘Exascale Supercomputing through Harmony of Innovations’ SHANKH in ancient Indian numerical system means a Quintillion

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) which is being steered jointly by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has progressed significantly. The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realize the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.

C-DAC has been entrusted the responsibility to design, development, deployment and commissioning of the supercomputing systems under the build approach of Mission. The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops. 

Mission:


C-DAC vision is to establish dependable and secure Exa-Scale High Performance Computing Eco-System in the country with innovative designs, disruptive technologies and Expert Human resource.

– to develop Hardware encompassing Exascale Chip Design, Design and Manufacture of Exascale Server Boards, Exascale Interconnects and Storage including Silicon-Photonics;

– to Exploit huge opportunities in System Software and High-end Software development to make India a Global Leader.

– To develop solutions for Grand Challenge Problems for the National/International Level

Building Exascale Capable System is the key enabler for accelerating scientific discovery in the world. There is a strong co-relation between research output and availability of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

Scaling from Tera (10 to the power of 12) to Peta (1015) to Exascale (1018) computing is the key to futuristic research problems and providing state-of-the-art solutions to grand challenge problems. Each of these solutions will have a wide spread societal impact.

Why Exascale?

India, through its major initiatives in National Supercomputing Mission and Microprocessor Development Program has made significant progress towards indigenous realization of supercomputers.

Such as:
 
• Servers
• High Speed Network Interconnects
• Storage Systems and
• HPC Microprocessors

C-DAC is geared up to realize totally indigenous Exascale Supercomputer called PARAM SHANKH under Atmanirbhar Bharat Mission.

Grand Challenge Problems Requiring Exascale Computing
 
• Numerical Weather Prediction (Monsoon Mission & Climate Modelling)
• Materials Research (Design of new materials)
• New periodic table (cluster of atoms?)
• Faster than real simulation (Electrical Grid Failure & Rail Accidents)
• National security (Real Time analysis of satellite images)
• Grand challenge problems in mathematics (crypto – analysis)
• Creating energy efficient enzymes (Conversion of solar to useful energy)
• Computational Fluid Dynamics (New insights into Internal Combustion Engine, Spacecrafts)
• Ab-INITIO Molecular Dynamics

Converged Models Applied To Grand Challenges

India is a major contributor in all these Mega Science Projects 

• Commercially viable fusion energy Improve/Validate the Standard Model of Physics
• Clinically viable precision medicine
• Understanding cosmological dark energy and matter
• Climate/weather forecasts with ultra-high fidelity

• >95% Prediction Accuracy for Fusion Disruptions with 60ms warning 
• Improve FastSim by 1,000,000x CERN Large Hadron Collider
• 300,000X Faster Predict Molecular Energetics for Drug Discovery
• Model the origins of the universe in 30ms
• Improve Climate and Weather models to sub 1km resolution