India’s super computing solution in a box – Param Shavak has seen demand increase from state governments to install them in universities and colleges for students to work on applications in areas such as bioinformatics and weather analysis, besides Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) said that it was seeing increased interest from state governments for Param Shavak, which was first launched in 2015. In the past year, the agency has installed over 100 of these units and CDAC Director General Hemant Darbari said that they were on track to install another 100 of these in 2019.
While in the initial days it was the institutes that were directly placing orders, now the state governments are stepping in and placing bulk orders.
“We received an order for ten Param Shavak’s from the Department of Science and Technology in Gujarat. They will then distribute this to engineering colleges and other institutes within the state,” he said. Similarly, CDAC had received an order for eight of these from the Department of Skill Development and Higher Education in Odisha.
Darbari said that the capabilities of the supercomputers too had been upgraded, from only offering high performance computing(HPC) to adding artificial intelligence and virtual reality capabilities as well. Some of the early applications of the Param Shavak include being used for research and developing biotech and biomedical applications.
The Param Shavak was introduced a few years ago to make supercomputing more accessible for educational and research institutes in India. It is available in a single server table top model and doesn’t require a separate data center unlike a full-scale supercomputer and aims to provide high performance computing capabilities for engineering and scientific applications to catalyse research using modelling, simulation and data analysis. Developed by the CDAC team in Pune, this is a stripped-down version of its Param supercomputer.
Significantly cheaper than the Param supercomputer, this has a peak computing power of three teraflops, as compared to the Param Yuva II supercomputer which has a peak of 524 teraflops.
Having access to a Param Shavak at the institute level often serves as the first step of introducing students to the possibilities of what they can do with HPC and allows them to create basic applications which could then be used on a supercomputer as well. These machines are an important part of the application creation process under India’s National Supercomputing Mission, where applications are being developed and tested on the Param Shavak supercomputers and would be ready to be used on the supercomputers once they are ready later this year.
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