IIT Guwahati gets powerful supercomputers

GUWAHATI: IIT-Guwahati got shot in arm as it received the fastest and most powerful supercomputer to be deployed in northeastern, eastern and southern regions of the country, outside Bangalore.

The supercomputing facility PARAM-ISHAN, with a peak computing power of 250 Teraflops was inaugurated by Union HRD minister, Prakash Javadekar on Monday.

Javadekar said, “As a big nation, we certainly face a number of problems. Effective R &D activities carried out in a strategic mode can be the solution to our most pressing problems. The coming together of C-DAC and IIT Guwahati for launching the supercomputer in Guwahati is a strategic move that will provide a boost to both the high-performance computing (HPC) users and the community through PARAM-ISHAN.”

Director of IIT Guwahati, Gautam Biswas said “PARAM-ISHAN will not only augment the research initiatives in the institute, but also help in creating an ecosystem for attracting the right talents to the field of research.”

SV Rao, head of the Computer Centre at IIT Guwahati said that for northeastern region the supercomputing facility can be used for weather and climate modeling as the area receives heavy rainfall during monsoon. It can also be used for seismic data processing since northeast comes under the highest risk seismic zone V.