IIT Kharagpur to Train Students on High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Check Details

IIT Kharagpur will train students on high-performance computing and artificial intelligence as part of an initiative launched by the Department of Science and Technology and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC). The initiative called “National Supercomputing Mission” includes several pre-eminent institutes such as IISc Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Guwahati, IIT Mandi, IIT Gandhinagar, NIT Trichy, NABI Mohali and NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC and AI at IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Goa, and IIT Palakkad.

IIT Kharagpur will focus on manpower creation and upskilling of students, faculty, scientists, researchers, scientific users in large scale computing across different science domains with an aim to bridge the gap between application and development aspects in HPC, said the IIT KGP Chronicle website. The aim of the mission is to train engineers for indigenous assembling and manufacturing to establish supercomputing infrastructure in the country and make the facilities available at an affordable cost.

Topics to be Covered by IIT Kharagpur in the First Phase

Some of the topics that will be covered by IIT Kharagpur as part of the project titled ‘NSM Nodal Center for training in HPC and AI’ are as follows:

• MPI
• OpenMP and CUDA programming
• Scientific computing
• HPC-AI convergence and application areas like multi-scale modeling
• Computational biology, computational fluid dynamics

IIT Kharagpur hosts a 1.3 Petaflop supercomputer named Paramshakti delivered and commissioned through NSM. The Institute has set up the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) funded by DST to carry out next-generation interdisciplinary research and teaching activities that involve this state-of-the-art HPC platform. Param-vidya, a dedicated computing platform will be made available to IIT Kharagpur under NSM for this training and upskilling purpose. Further, Rs 55.7 Lakh has been approved for a period of two years as initial funding for the project to run the NSM Nodal center and conduct training programs, adds the website.

C-DAC, under the aegis of MeitY, signed 13 MoUs on 12 October 2020 with premier academic and R&D institutions of India. NSM envisages empowering national academic and R&D institutions to spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. The mission also includes the development of highly professional High-Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting the challenges of development of these applications. The mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large scientific and technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity to solve multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.