IIT Kharagpur to get Supercomputing facility

IIT Kharagpur is in the process of setting up a new Centre for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) around such a supercomputing platform to build, manage, and operate the high performance computing facility to provide large computational support to the users to carry out both Research and Teaching activities that involve state-of-the-art high performance computing (HPC).

“Faculty members and their research groups at IIT Kharagpur are engaged in research activities in several areas of national importance that require large computational (both hardware and software) support. The 1 Peta-Flop new system with both CPU and CPU-GPU based servers along with the already existing HPC equipment will provide about 1.5 Peta-Flop capacity support to several such areas in which the researchers of IIT Kharagpur are actively engaged. This will accelerate and evolve the level of research currently being done exponentially improving the output and efficiency,” said Prof. P P Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur.

The facility will cover cutting-edge research in different interdisciplinary areas that include Biomolecular Simulations, Drug Design and Bioinformatics; Climate Change and Digital Earth; Geo-Scientific Exploration, Infrastructure Design and Sustainable Cities; Modeling and Mining of Heterogeneous Information Network; Design and Multi-scale Modeling of Novel Materials for Next Generation Technology; Computational Fluid Dynamics; Designing and Attacking Cryptographic Ciphers and Protocols; Non-equilibrium Molecular Dynamics studies of Materials Fracture, etc.

“Other than research, the Centre will also focus on education and capacity building. It will promote high performance computational research excellence in different areas for PhD and Post doctoral fellows as well as focused courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels,” added Prof. Chakraborty.

“Elective courses have been planned for B.Tech. students across all streams under this Centre. Besides, the students may opt for any of the above areas and avail a Microspecialization certification in addition to the regular B.Tech. degree. These courses are planned from the coming semesters. M.Tech., Dual Degree and MS courses will also be launched by the Centre at a later phase. Short-term courses for working professionals and external students will be launched soon under this Centre,” said Prof. Sanjoy Bandyopadhyay, member NSM Expert Group on Human Resource Development, who is coordinating the project at IIT Kharagpur.

More than sixty faculty members and their research groups across various disciplines of Science and Engineering will be actively engaged in this centre. Additionally, IIT Kharagpur will also recruit core faculty members for the Centre.

IIT Kharagpur has been chosen as a nodal center for HPC-related educational activities by NSM. The objective of NSM is driven by the aim of consolidating efforts to achieve a self-reliant supercomputing platform in India, and to develop and expand the culture of using high performance computing (HPC) systems to solve complex problems that are of national importance in different application domains of Science and Technology. The initiative is supported by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

This mission envisages building supercomputing capacity and capability in the country with an estimated budget of Rs. 4500 Crore over a period of 7 years.