"PARAM ANANTA", the 15th Made in India Supercomputer Under NSM Commissioned At IIT Gandhinagar

PARAM ANANTA, a state-of the art Made-in-India Supercomputer of 838 TeraFlops capacity has been dedicated to the nation today, under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) — a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

"Ananta", the name of the supercomputer, literally means ‘endless’ or ‘limitless’. The logo design symbolises the Sudarshan Chakra in the form of the Sun along with data grid mountains merging in perspective with the limitless horizon.

The new facility will provide a tremendous amount of computational power to the scientific community of IITGN as well as the academic institutions and industries in the vicinity of the Institute to take their Research and Development (R&D) efforts to a global scale: IITGN pic.twitter.com/NBykv7T7h2

— DeshGujarat (@DeshGujarat) May 30, 2022

The supercomputer, which is 15th supercomputer under NSM till date, was commissioned at Indian Institute of Technology - Gandhinagar (IIT Gandhinagar) by Sunita Verma, Group Coordinator & Scientist 'G', Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Prof. Amit Prashant, officiating Director, IIT Gandhinagar.

A portion of the total compute power shall also be shared with the nearby academic and research institutes as per the mandate of NSM. Further, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for and other Indian institutes and industries. Overall, this Supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.

Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops. All these supercomputers are completely Made in India.

PARAM ANANTA supercomputing facility is established under Phase-2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.

Prior to this, a Petascale Supercomputer "PARAM Shakti" at IIT Kharagpur, was unveiled in March this year. Earlier in year 2020, the government has announced a 100 Artificial Intelligence (AI) PetaFlops supercomputing system, PARAM Siddhi – AI, created and installed in C-DAC facility by NVIDIA.

PARAM ANANTA is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage and high performance Infiniband interconnect to cater the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications.

The system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.  Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers. This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.

PARAM ANANTA Supercomputing Facility will be of great benefit to IIT Gandhinagar to pursue the Research and Development (R&D) activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and technology at the Institute, including, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); Bio-engineering for Genome Sequencing and DNA studies; Computational Biology and Bioinformatics used in prediction and detection of gene networks; Atomic & Molecular Sciences that helps in understanding how a drug binds to a particular protein.

Besides, the supercomputing facility will also be beneficial for studies & research in Climate Change and Environment studies for extreme weather predictions and simulation of models which can predict the onset of a cyclone;  Energy studies which will help in carrying out design simulation and optimization of energy conversion devices at various scales; Fire Dynamics Simulation; Nanotechnology; Robotics; Applied mathematics; Astronomy and Astrophysics; Material Sciences; Quantum Mechanics; Studies on Civil Engineering and structural mechanics to understand the dynamic behaviour of buildings, bridges; and complex structure.

IIT Gandhinagar Students Develops Smart Wearable to Monitors Water Level in Human Body

Two IIT students have developed an easy-to-wear wrist band that monitors the water level in the human body and warns its users against dehydration.

Named "Hydro Check", it uses sensors to monitor pulse rate, body temperature, ambient temperature and bioelectrical impedance. Bioelectrical impedance analysis is a commonly used method to estimate body composition, particularly body fat and muscle mass.

"All these parameters are related to the hydration level of the human body," said Geetika Sonke, a chemical engineering student at IIT-Guwahati.

IIT-Goa's Priyanka Arora said people do not drink enough water in their busy lives. "Drinking water is never on our priority list and not drinking water can cause dehydration. Currently, there are no device in the market that could measure hydration levels of the human body over a day," Arora said.

Existing solutions include mobile applications that track hydration levels, she explained. "But users have to manually enter the volume of water they consume every time they drink water. Another alternative is a hydration monitoring patch based on sweat sensing technology. It is costly and works only when there's sweat on skin," she added.

The device the two Indian Institute of Technology students developed uses an algorithm that computes all the sensor data to generate a dynamic score as an indicator of hydration.

If a user is in a hot environment for a long time then the device calculates that the need of water by body is high. If long time has passed in a hot environment and no drinking gesture is detected then the hydration score changes and the user is reminded to drink water.

The device also uses motion sensors to detect a pattern characterised by drinking (such as eating, walking, smoking).

The two students showed their product at "Invent@IITGN", a six-week annual summer programme at IIT-Gandhinagar. In its second year, the programme is based on the "Invention Factory" event in the US. They have filed a claim to get a patent for the device. PTI GJS GJS