IIT Delhi has offered the use of the PADUM supercomputer

IIT Delhi has offered the use of its high performance computational resources (supercomputer) for research work regarding COVID-19 for the next 6 months.

About the Initiative

IIT Delhi has offered computational time worth about 1 crore INR for free for conducting research regarding COVID-19. This can be used by private firms, academic institutions as well as the government institutions. Each project can use up to 10 lakh INR worth of computational resource. The projects will be evaluated and selected on first come first serve basis.

PADUM

The PADUM is a hybrid high performance computational facility that was installed at IIT Delhi in 2015. It is the 4^th fastest supercomputer in India and was featured in the top 500 at the time of its launch. It is powered by NVIDIA’s GPU Tesla Platform. It is an 860 teraflops centralised HPC.

Supercomputers in India

The supercomputing program in India was initiated in 1980s. The PARAM 8000 is considered as the first supercomputer in India. Several of the Indian supercomputers have featured in the TOP500 list. Currently, the Pratyush (at 57^th rank) and the Mihir (at the 100^th) are the 2 systems on the list. Overall, India is ranked at the 22^nd position on the list.