Key Highlights
- PARAM SHAKTI, powered by the indigenous PARAM RUDRA cluster, achieved a peak throughput of 3.1 petaflops.
- The facility is housed within IIT Madras and offers uninterrupted power, advanced cooling, and full data‑centre infrastructure.
- It serves a wide spectrum of research domains—from aerospace and climate modelling to drug discovery and nuclear science.
- Built with open‑source stack (AlmaLinux) and C‑DAC’s proprietary system software, it exemplifies India’s push for diversified HPC architectures.
- Its deployment advances the objectives of the National Supercomputing Mission and the IndiaAI initiative.
Detailed Insights
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) inaugurated PARAM SHAKTI on 3 January 2026 at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The supercomputing centre is anchored by the PARAM RUDRA system, a home‑grown petascale machine engineered by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C‑DAC) under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). With a theoretical performance ceiling of 3.1 petaflops—equivalent to more than three quadrillion floating‑point operations per second—the platform can sustain massive, compute‑intensive workloads without interruption, thanks to redundant power supplies, state‑of‑the‑art cooling, and robust data‑centre facilities.
Operating exclusively on open‑source software such as AlmaLinux, alongside C‑DAC’s custom middleware, PARAM SHAKTI provides researchers with exposure to heterogeneous computing environments, including multiple GPU architectures. This strategic diversification aligns with the IndiaAI Mission’s vision of reducing reliance on a single vendor and fostering a resilient national computing ecosystem.
Scientists at IIT Madras have already leveraged the system for projects spanning sub‑atomic simulations, large‑scale structural analyses, and interdisciplinary studies that cut experimental turnaround times and lower research costs. The supercomputer’s versatility supports critical sectors such as aerospace engineering, materials science, climate and weather prediction, combustion physics, molecular dynamics, nuclear research, and pharmaceutical discovery.
MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan emphasized that IIT Madras was chosen as a hub because of its strong multidisciplinary faculty base and its role within the NSM framework, which already hosts 37 supercomputing installations across the country. Targeted government funding will further catalyse application‑driven projects, ensuring that the immense computational capacity translates into tangible innovations.
Key Concepts
- Petaflop: A performance metric denoting one quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating‑point operations per second, used to gauge supercomputer speed.
- National Supercomputing Mission (NSM): An Indian government programme aimed at establishing a network of high‑performance computing facilities to accelerate scientific discovery and industry.
- Open‑source stack: Software that is freely available, modifiable, and distributable; in this context, AlmaLinux serves as the operating system for PARAM SHAKTI.
- Heterogeneous computing: Utilisation of diverse processing units—CPU, GPU, and specialised accelerators—to optimise performance for varied workloads.
- IndiaAI Mission: A policy initiative that seeks to position India as a global leader in artificial intelligence through research, talent development, and infrastructure.