India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed an affordable supercomputer for universities conducting high-end research. Already deployed at 25 institutions, the Param Shavak is a GPU-accelerated desktop machine that sports over 2 Teraflops of performance.
The PARAM Shavak solution aims to provide computational resource (Capacity building) with advanced technologies to perform high-end computations for scientific, engineering and academic programs to address and catalyze the research using modeling, simulation and data analysis. This initiative is expected to create HPC aware skilled workforce (Capability building) and for promoting research by integrating leading-edge emerging technologies at grass root level. As the scope and complexity of computational needs continue to increase at colleges universities, professors and administrators are compelled to seek appropriate and affordable solutions. PARAM Shavak provides the computing power necessary to keep academic institutions on the leading edge in today’s competitive market at affordable cost. This system is meant for research organizations and academic institutions that are on the verge of adopting HPC culture in their institutions/organizations. Besides a handful of value additions from C-DAC, the system comes with most of the features that can be found in a full blown HPC clusters job schedulers, compilers, parallel libraries, MPI, resource managers, some of the commonly used HPC applications in engineering scientific domains etc.
The system consists of 2 multicore CPUs each with a minimum 12 cores along with two GPU accelerator cards. The entire configuration is available in a single server in a table top model. According to C-DAC, the system does not require a datacenter air-conditioned environment and is not as noisy as traditional servers.
Built-in HPC Applications
- Bio-informatics: mpiBLAST
- Molecular Dynamics: GROMACS
- Materials Science: Quantum Espresso
- Quantum Chemistry: NWChem, ABINIT
- Atmospheric and Ocean Modeling: WRF, MOM
- CFD: Open FOAM
India has stepped up its supercomputing efforts of late, having deployed their first Petaflop Cray system at SERC in 2015.
As reported here, the world-wide series of Student Cluster Competitions is also coming to India this year. As part of the Inaugural Distributed & Embedded-High Performance Computing (de-HPC) Symposium, ISSC “The Supercomputing Game” will take place during June 1-4 in VMCC IIT Bombay.
