Kolkata: The city’s computing capability leapfrogged on Wednesday with the commissioning of a PARAM Rudra Supercomputer at the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBNCBS). This supercomputer will vastly improve the magnitude of computing power compared to the currently available facility and help crunch more complex numbers and equations in a fraction of the time.
The supercomputer will also lead to greater collaboration among scientific institutes in Kolkata and its periphery, giving a leg-up to research in fields ranging from advanced materials to high energy physics and astronomy.
The supercomputer in Kolkata was among three such machines that Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated remotely on Wednesday. The other two are in Pune and Delhi. PARAM is a series of Indian supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune.
Speaking to TOI, SNBNCBS director Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta said the supercomputers worth around Rs 130 crore developed indigenously under the National Supercomputing Mission were world-standard in terms of speed and memory.
“Scientists and researchers at Bose Institute, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB), Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, and others will benefit from this computing hub at SN Bose Centre. We are creating a user facility to cater to the computational needs of researchers. It is a breakthrough in terms of the city’s computational power requirements,” the SNBNCBS director said.
Saha-Dasgupta also expects the supercomputer to foster more collaboration among scientists from different institutes.
IISER-Kolkata professor Dibyendu Nandi said he was personally happy that SN Bose Centre had managed to attract the facility to Kolkata given the dearth of such high-end computing facilities in the city.“This is a good beginning for scientists here,” he said.