West Bengal, India: Hon’ble Governor of West Bengal, Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar dedicated to the nation, a Petascale Supercomputer PARAM Shakti under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) on March 27, 2022 at IIT Kharagpur. Dr. Sivaji Chadaram, Director, DST; Col A K Nath (Retd), Director General and Executive Director, Centre of Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC); Prof Amit Patra, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur; Shri Arvind Kumar, Group Coordinator, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Shri S A Kumar, Advisor NSM, MeitY, along with other senior faculties and officials of IIT Kharagpur, MeitY, DST and C-DAC were present in the occasion. Dr. Rashmi Kamal, IAS, District Magistrate, Paschim Medinipur and Shri Dinesh Kumar, IPS, Superintendent of Police, Paschim Medinipur also graced the occasion with their presence.
PARAM Shakt, a Petascale Supercomputer at IIT Kharagpur dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) was inaugurated on March 27, 2022 by His Excellency Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar, Honourable Governor, West Bengal in gracious presence of Prof V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur; Dr. Sivaji Chadaram, Director, DST; Col A.K Nath (Retd), Director General and Executive Director, Centre of Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC); Prof Amit Patra, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur; Shri Arvind Kumar, Group Coordinator, NSM- HPC Division, MeitY; Shri S A Kumar, Advisor NSM, MeitY, along with other senior officials from MeitY, DST, IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC. PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighbouring academic and R&D institutes.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of the art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores alongwith 44 GPUs. This facility has pioneered in using RDHX based efficient cooling system to obtain a high power usage effectiveness. This system has been tested extensively by both IIT Kharagpur and CDAC for commercial, open-source and in-house software pertaining to diversified applications.
IIT Kharagpur has been following the mandate of NSM towards development of computationally efficient software for supercomputing platforms and applications for large-scale industrial and scientific problems. IIT Kharagpur is also one of the NSM nodal centres for training in HPC and AI and working on development manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation. This centre has been organizing courses, workshops, bootcamps etc. in various domains pertaining to fundamentals of supercomputing and data sciences and their application to diversified fields including Agriculture, Astronomy, Biology, Mechanical Engineering, Material Sciences etc. IIT Kharagpur has also established the Centre for Computational and Data Science with a mandate to train the researchers in Supercomputer accelerated R&D. The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering. Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing based research will be of great value addition are: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials etc. Furthermore, NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for IIT Kharagpur 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.
Hon’ble Govenor of West Bengal visits Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge System at IIT Kharagpur which establishes the relevance of Traditional Knowledge Systems & ancient wisdom in contemporary times in synergy with Modern Scientific Knowledge.
The Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge System, IIT Kharagpur is dedicated to forward the relevance of traditional knowledge systems & ancient wisdom in contemporary times and their role in the making of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. The various aims and objective are to synergise modern scientific knowledge with Indian art, architecture, sociology, culture, language with a spirit of Bharatiyata as forwarded by National Education Policy 2020, Government of India. By taking the Indian knowledge systems forward, the Centre will start a new era, interconnecting IKS with contemporary, contextual relevance to reinvigorate with the Indian youth. The centre started functioning with ten key domains in Arthashastra (Indian Economics), Sanskrit and other Indian Languages (for Natural Language Processing), Samkhya, Ganita and Jyamiti (Vedic and Indian Numerology, Mathematics and Geometry), Rasayana etc
Hon’ble Governor of West Bengal, Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar felicitates notable Alumni of IIT Kharagpur Mr. Vinod Gupta with Honoris Causa (Doctor of Science) 2020, Mr. Ashoke Deysarkar with Life Fellow Award 2021 and Prof Kalyan Chakravarti with Distinguished Alumnus Award 2020.
He also felicitated Institute Professors Prof Mrityunjoy Chakraborty (E & ECE) with Prithviraj & Swati Banerjee Chair Professorship; Prof Prabir Kumar Biswas (E & ECE) with VSNL Chair Professorship; Prof Goutam Saha, (E & ECE) with VSNL Chair Professorship; Prof Saibal Gupta (G & G) with Prof P K Bhattacharya Chair Professor; Prof Amar Nath Samanta (CE) with Prof N K Roy Chair Professor.
