IITs ties-up with C-DAC to develop supercomputing facility

The initiative will be funded under the National Supercomputing Mission- a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

Three Indian Institutes of Technology has signed an agreement with the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to establish high-performance computing facilities for research and development in the institutes. The agreements were signed between the IITs and C-DAC in the presence of Union Minister of State for Education, Communication and Electronics and Information Technology, Sanjay Dhotre.

It has been signed as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) launched in 2015 to attain self-reliance and enhance global competitiveness in the supercomputing technology and to establish facilities to facilitate research in the discipline. NSM aims to install all the supercomputers by 2022.

C-DAC will install the supercomputing facility using the building approach of NSM in the three IITs and will provide necessary data centre space, power with backup, cooling, etc. for the facility, the statement said. 

The agreement between IIT Roorkee and C-DAC was signed between the Director of the institute Professor Ajit K. Chaturvedi, on behalf of IIT Roorkee and Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General on behalf of CDAC. The objective of this agreement,  is to ensure the supply, installation, commissioning and operations of state-of-the-art HPC facility and data center ecosystem at IIT Roorkee, the institute said in a statement.

The agreement is valid for a period of five years. The initiative will be funded under the National Supercomputing Mission- a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

According to the agreement, IIT Roorkee will contribute towards the NSM in areas of application and system software environment, capacity-building and training of the manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation. It will be mandated to make the HPC facility commissioned under this project for the faculty and students for academic and research purposes.

The agreement between the two parties was signed Professor Ajit K. Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Mandi, and Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC, India, during a virtual event in the presence of Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State (Electronics and Information Technology, Education and Communications), and Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology. The agreement has been signed for a period of five years and can be extended by mutual agreement. The agreement seeks to establish Rs 17 crore worth of supercomputing facility for research and development activities at the institute.

“The National Supercomputing Mission is an important initiative of the Government of India. C-DAC along with the IISc, IITs, and, NITs, is playing an eminent role in achieving the goal of Digital India and Atmanirbhar Bharat mission. These MoUs will help in increasing India's global relevance in the field of Supercomputing. I congratulate C-DAC and partner Institutes for this milestone,” said Mr Dhotre during the virtual event.

An IIT Guwahati statement said: “The new Supercomputer to be set up by C-DAC at IIT Guwahati with 650 TFLOPS is more powerful and a technologically superior facility, which will play an important role in the field of scientific and engineering applications such as quantum mechanics, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modelling, weather forecasting, spacecraft aerodynamics, computational systems biology and detonation simulations including the handling of large databases using Artificial intelligence models.”

The agreement was signed between Professor T.G. Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati and the Director General of C-DAC.

IIT Guwahati will also organise training courses to popularise the use and applications of supercomputers and other major missions of the Government of India in the northeastern region.

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